Tootfinder

Gurman: as part of Vision Pro cuts, Apple is largely shutting down a team focused on gaming and reducing the size of a unit producing immersive video content (Chance Miller/9to5Mac)
https://9to5mac.com/2026/08/21/apple-lays-off-200-people-across-vis…

Apple lays off 200+ across Vision Pro and Siri teams - 9to5Mac
Apple has cut more than 200 jobs across Vision Pro, Siri, and software teams, including shuttering a Vision Pro gaming group, per Bloomberg.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #SeekAndDestroy
Agriculture:
🎵 Bodhidharma
#Agriculture
https://agriculturemusic.bandcamp.com/track/bodhidharma
https://open.spotify.com/track/1NoYnWzMQ1mY67jo7gDakq

Statt Wearables: Google-Forscher messen Körperfett anhand von Smartphone-Fotos
Google zeigt mit Photoscan AI, dass künftig einfache 2D-Bilder ausreichen, um die genaue Verteilung des Fettanteils im Körper darzustellen.

Statt Wearables: Google-Forscher messen Körperfett anhand von Smartphone-Fotos
Google zeigt mit Photoscan AI, dass künftig einfache 2D-Bilder ausreichen, um die genaue Verteilung des Fettanteils im Körper darzustellen.

AI advice suppresses people’s willingness to say “I don’t know”, even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13562v1

AI advice suppresses people's willingness to say "I don't know", even when the advice is wrong and accuracy is incentivized
Knowing when to say "I don't know" is fundamental to human judgment, yet AI assistants offer a fluent answer to almost any question. In five experiments (N = 3,132; four preregistered, one direct replication), participants answered difficult questions and could always decline to respond. We engineered the questions so that AI advice was wrong, separating AI use from its accuracy. Merely having access to AI nearly eliminated participants' willingness to suspend judgment, and this held whether th…

Google rolls out an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google

Google Expands Personalization Across Search, Discover & News
Google is rolling out a new embeddable Preferred Sources button, natural language Discover controls, and customizable audio briefings in the Google News app.

Orientation Reading by Production Vision-Language Models on Optotype Charts: A Controlled Multi-Model Evaluation Across Reasoning Modes, Prompts, and Access Modalities
Shahryar Wasif, Avneek Sandhu, Bin Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.16595 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.16595 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.16595
arXiv:2607.16595v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: OBJECTIVES: Vision-language models are increasingly used to interpret medical and everyday images through consumer chat interfaces, yet their ability to read orientation - the single perceptual operation tested by the tumbling-E acuity optotype - is poorly characterized on the surfaces through which they are actually used. METHODS: We evaluated four production vision-language models (referred to as Claude, GPT, GROK, and Gemini) through their consumer chat interfaces on a locked set of seven optotype charts: four uniform tumbling-E charts (one per cardinal orientation), two mixed-orientation tumbling-E charts, and one Snellen letter chart as a specificity control. Each model was run in two reasoning modes (Fast and Thinking) under two prompt variants (with and without an explicit orientation-decoding rule) by up to three operators. The corpus comprised 920 scoreable trials and 50,420 glyph judgements. The primary outcome was glyph-level accuracy against the chart's designed orientation, summarized with Wilson 95% confidence intervals. RESULTS: Accuracy ranged from 43.0% to 97.0% across models on identical charts, and the strongest model depended on reasoning mode (GPT 97.0% in Fast mode; GROK 96.6% in Thinking mode). Errors were not random but collapsed onto a model-specific attractor direction. Models were 96-100% internally self-consistent yet ranged widely in accuracy, dissociating reliability from validity. An answer-key-free ensemble-consensus estimate tracked accuracy closely (r = 0.998). For one model, consumer-interface accuracy fell 25-27 points below programmatic access, almost entirely on a single orientation. CONCLUSIONS: A single accuracy figure conceals clinically relevant, orientation-specific failure modes; vision-language models should be evaluated along multiple axes and on the deployment surface before image-interpretation outputs are trusted.
toXiv_bot_toot

Just on the way to bed and to the South East on the horizon is a spectacular thunder storm. I checked my lightning app and I can see it a huge storm stretching from Amiens to Lille in France - 140 miles away across the Channel!
#weather #lightning

Google rolls out an embeddable "Preferred Sources" button, natural language Discover controls, and custom audio briefings in the Google News app on Android (Matt G. Southern/Search Engine Journal)
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google

Google Expands Personalization Across Search, Discover & News
Google is rolling out a new embeddable Preferred Sources button, natural language Discover controls, and customizable audio briefings in the Google News app.

Asteroideneinschlag: Dinosaurier von äußerst seltenem Meteoritentyp ausgelöscht
Der Asteroid, der vor 66 Millionen Jahren die Dinosaurier ausgelöscht hat, gehörte wohl einer seltenen Klasse an. Das Aussterben lief anders ab als gedacht.

Asteroideneinschlag: Dinosaurier von äußerst seltenem Meteoritentyp ausgelöscht
Der Asteroid, der vor 66 Millionen Jahren die Dinosaurier ausgelöscht hat, gehörte wohl einer seltenen Klasse an. Das Aussterben lief anders ab als gedacht.

Blackstone agrees to invest an undisclosed sum in South Korea-based Futronic, which makes actuators used in industrial robots, sources say at a ~$675M valuation (Manuel Baigorri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20