Tootfinder

Voice authentication???
I would not trust the basic competence of any org doing that. Facial recognition is bad enough.
Part of this is that I’m whatever the voice equivalent is to face-blindness. I don’t believe that such a thing as a “voice print” can exist. I can tell the difference between Neil Young and Bob Dylan, but any more similar and I’m lost.

I plan to bow out of NYT #Wordle after tomorrow. I’ll miss the friendly competition with the #OldGal & #YoungPups. Their announcement that they’ll start reusing previous answers as of Monday Feb, 2 was enough t…

"Dispensing false information in a confident tone, rather than offering no answer when none is readily available, is a major flaw of generative AI, experts say. An audit of the top 10 generative AI model... by the media literacy non-profit NewsGuard revealed that the non-response rates of chatbots went down from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025. At the same time, the chatbots’ likelihood of repeating false information almost doubled from 18% to 35%"

Angreifer steigen über Zero-Day-Lücke bei Logitech ein | heise online
https://heise.de/-11080333

Angreifer steigen über Zero-Day-Lücke bei Logitech ein
Beim Hersteller für Computerperipherie Logitech gab es einen IT-Sicherheitsvorfall. Dabei konnten Angreifer auf interne Daten zugreifen.

A US judge rules that Apple and OpenAI must answer to a lawsuit filed by X and xAI accusing them of conspiring to thwart competition in emerging markets in AI (Madlin Mekelburg/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

LoD-Structured 3D Gaussian Splatting for Streaming Video Reconstruction
Xinhui Liu, Can Wang, Lei Liu, Zhenghao Chen, Wei Jiang, Wei Wang, Dong Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.18475 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.18475 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.18475
arXiv:2601.18475v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Free-Viewpoint Video (FVV) reconstruction enables photorealistic and interactive 3D scene visualization; however, real-time streaming is often bottlenecked by sparse-view inputs, prohibitive training costs, and bandwidth constraints. While recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has advanced FVV due to its superior rendering speed, Streaming Free-Viewpoint Video (SFVV) introduces additional demands for rapid optimization, high-fidelity reconstruction under sparse constraints, and minimal storage footprints. To bridge this gap, we propose StreamLoD-GS, an LoD-based Gaussian Splatting framework designed specifically for SFVV. Our approach integrates three core innovations: 1) an Anchor- and Octree-based LoD-structured 3DGS with a hierarchical Gaussian dropout technique to ensure efficient and stable optimization while maintaining high-quality rendering; 2) a GMM-based motion partitioning mechanism that separates dynamic and static content, refining dynamic regions while preserving background stability; and 3) a quantized residual refinement framework that significantly reduces storage requirements without compromising visual fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StreamLoD-GS achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in terms of quality, efficiency, and storage.
toXiv_bot_toot

The year starts with a new competition case re. public EV charging prices in Italy. The competition authority has decided to conduct a further investigation into A2A Mobility, as prices charged to others were higher than in their own app.
https://www.agcm.it/pubblicazioni/bolletti<…

Another failure of #ChatGPT. I asked if a diagram had ever appeared in anything I'd published. It confidently gave me three answers, all wrong, before admitting that it couldn't find it. It even gave totally wrong Figure numbers. When I pointed this out, I got the usual dose of mock humility.
#AI…

Chicago is getting a place for sickos
#fedifc

💥 Pro-cycling crashes can be bad, but evidence suggests slower bikes aren't the answer
#sports

Pro-cycling crashes can be bad, but evidence suggests slower bikes aren't the answer
It might seem counterintuitive in a sport built around speed, but the world governing body for competitive cycling wants to slow elite riders down.