Tootfinder

Wanna know why #psycholinguistics is so fascinating?
In a 2001 #experiment participants saw sentences like
"While Mary dressed the baby played in the crib."
Then they had to answer the question:
"Did Mary dress the baby?"
Up to 51% of all answers where "Yes!" – and participants were *very* confident about their answers.
🤯
Original paper:
Christianson, Kiel & Hollingworth, Andrew & Halliwell, John F. & Ferreira, Fernanda (2001). Thematic Roles Assigned along the Garden Path Linger. Cognitive Psychology 42(4). 368–407. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.2001.0752
Also a fascinating read:
Ferreira, Fernanda & Bailey, Karl G.D. & Ferraro, Vittoria (2002). Good-Enough Representations in Language Comprehension. Current Directions in Psychological Science 11(1). 11–15. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00158

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, is demanding answers from a medical journal that recently removed a paper suggesting a link between vaccines and infant death, saying their decision was “of great interest to me”.
The journal Toxicology Reports had removed the paper this spring after editors determined it was so seriously flawed it could harm patients and pose a risk to public health.
Public health advocates immediately criticized the move, and said Kennedy appeared t…

My response: The paper, all experimental items, the entire experiment code AND the analysis code and raw results are all publicly available online. But I can only answer concrete, specific questions.

"everything is brittle and at the mercy of anyone angry enough to poke it"
As a magnet, sticker, mug or more.
Get yours: https://davidaugust.threadless.com/designs/warehouse-fire/accessories/sticker
h/t @…

My name is Beth Macy.
I’m the author of best-sellers Dopesick and Paper Girl,
and I’m the Democrat who’s running against Ben Cline in VA-06.  
Virginia’s Supreme Court just overturned the redistricting referendum that our voters approved last month. 
I'm not a lawyer, and I won't pretend to have all the answers on what comes next legally.
What I do know is this: the country is on fire, and decisions like this one represent another serious step backward.…

Donate to Beth Macy
Show your support with a contribution.

Answering the dilemma of cycle lane versus shared space planning through an agent-based simulation experiment and accessibility equity analysis
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s44327-026-00200-8

Answering the dilemma of cycle lane versus shared space planning through an agent-based simulation experiment and accessibility equity analysis - Discover Cities
This paper explores a vital dilemma about the future of urban road infrastructure: whether to dedicate space for each sustainable transport mode, such as m

A working paper uses an LLM to analyze political discourse on X, finding that anger is the dominant emotion expressed by US users, especially those over 65 (Tim Harford/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/914d0e31-231c-4663-9b39-c81d80187aef

Christmas presents come from Santa Claus. Easter baskets from the Easter Bunny. But where do birthday presents come from?
When I was little my brothers and I concluded that the answer was... The Birthday Moose.
One of the non-birthday brothers would be designated the Moose. The outfit of the day was a brown paper grocery bag with a pair of eyes drawn on it in black marker, a lunch bag taped on the front as a snout, and sometimes a pair of cardboard ears up top.
Notably, tra…

The Brain That Goes Quiet: Serving a Large Model's Knowledge at 131 Tokens per Second on an 8 GB Laptop by Removing the Large Model from the Runtime Path
Myeong Jun Jo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12154 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.12154 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.12154
arXiv:2606.12154v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In earlier work I showed that a 35B-class Mixture-of-Experts model can be loaded and executed on a consumer laptop with 8 GB of GPU memory. That result solved a placement problem and immediately exposed a different one: even correctly placed, the large model needed roughly four seconds to answer, because it was still being invoked at every query. This paper documents what happened when I stopped invoking it. During an offline phase, the large model reads source documents and writes verified answer entries into a structured knowledge store; at runtime, only a lightweight router, a deterministic renderer, and a 1B-class model are active. On the same 8 GB laptop, end-to-end response time fell from approximately 4,465 ms to 518 ms, effective end-to-end throughput rose from 15.7 to 131 tokens per second, and the small model's streaming decode rate held at 226-237 tokens per second with a time-to-first-token of 29-62 ms. The bottleneck is structural: three different large models (Qwen, Gemma, and GLM class) all showed the same multi-second runtime cost, and all three produced usable knowledge stores offline. On a 563-entry store built from seventeen real documents, keyword routing collapsed to 1.5% top-1 accuracy while BM25-based routing reached 92.8% (99.4% top-3), and a confidence gate raised effective top-1 to 98.0% by escalating 12.3% of queries. Exact-match fidelity of the small model ranged from 9/9 to 0/9 across envelope formats carrying identical content. A 16-case verification gate blocked all ten corrupted entries while admitting all six supported ones.
toXiv_bot_toot

People that "want a phone call" instead of just answering a simple question in email.
➡️ Don't want a paper trail
➡️ Are unable to put their thoughts into written words
➡️ Don't know how or are too lazy to type
#thismeetingcouldhavebeenanemail