Tootfinder

"The lack of an announced successor space for the National Science Foundation and accusations of largesse to the Housing and Urban Development secretary have swirled since the proposal was unveiled last week."
Virginia lawmakers demand answers on Trump’s planned ‘displacement’ of NSF - Government Executive
https://www.govexec.com/management/2025/06/virginia-lawmakers-demand-answers-trumps-planned-displacement-nsf/406429/

A group of Democratic senators is demanding answers from the Department of Education
on its decision to renege on its obligation to 3 million student loan borrowers enrolled in the
"Income-Based Repayment program",
which forgives any remaining student debt after 300 payments, which typically takes about 25 years.

Lawmakers Slam DOE for Suspending 3 Million Borrowers’ Student Loan Forgiveness
The Department of Education suspended a program that forgives any remaining student debt after 300 payments.

Low-Energy Calibration of SuperCDMS HVeV Cryogenic Silicon Calorimeters Using Compton Steps
SuperCDMS Collaboration, M. F. Albakry, I. Alkhatib, D. Alonso-Gon\'zalez, D. W. P. Amaral, J. Anczarski, T. Aralis, T. Aramaki, I. Ataee Langroudy, C. Bathurst, R. Bhattacharyya, A. J. Biffl, P. L. Brink, M. Buchanan, R. Bunker, B. Cabrera, R. Calkins, R. A. Cameron, C. Cartaro, D. G. Cerde\~no, Y. -Y. Chang, M. Chaudhuri, J. -H. Chen, R. Chen, N. Chott, J. Cooley, H. Coombes, P. Cushman, R…

Low-Energy Calibration of SuperCDMS HVeV Cryogenic Silicon Calorimeters Using Compton Steps
Cryogenic calorimeters for low-mass dark matter searches have achieved sub-eV energy resolutions, driving advances in both low-energy calibration techniques and our understanding of detector physics. The energy deposition spectrum of gamma rays scattering off target materials exhibits step-like features, known as Compton steps, near the binding energies of atomic electrons. We demonstrate a successful use of Compton steps for sub-keV calibration of cryogenic silicon calorimeters, utilizing four…

📞 Teenagers no longer answer the phone: Is it a lack of manners or a new trend?
#telephone

Teenagers no longer answer the phone: Is it a lack of manners or a new trend?
Teenagers can seem to have their phones glued to their hands—yet they won't answer them when they ring. This scenario, which is all too familiar to many parents, can seem absurd and frustrating, or even alarming to some.

Moment Sampling in Video LLMs for Long-Form Video QA
Mustafa Chasmai, Gauri Jagatap, Gouthaman KV, Grant Van Horn, Subhransu Maji, Andrea Fanelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00033 …

Moment Sampling in Video LLMs for Long-Form Video QA
Recent advancements in video large language models (Video LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of video question answering (VideoQA). While existing methods perform well on short videos, they often struggle with long-range reasoning in longer videos. To scale Video LLMs for longer video content, frame sub-sampling (selecting frames at regular intervals) is commonly used. However, this approach is suboptimal, often leading to the loss of crucial frames or the inclusion of redundant inform…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

Interesting thing about tomorrow's tarot show, rendering now, is that I upgraded from Blender 4.0 to blender 4.4 and it's quite a bit nicer to look at the timeline editor.
Was sad to find that the render time was up though. From about 3 seconds per frame usually to more like 12!?
Trying it with an old version I see that the lights and textures look way better with 4.4 than 4.0 though. A substantial step up in the way the show looks without me even doing anything other than waiting four times longer per frame.
Seems to be heavily dependent upon lighting now. The slow frames are like 12 seconds but the fast frames with minimal lighting and close up on the video are more like 2.
Looks too beautiful now to go back though. Upgraded my cloud-remote render machines too. We will render on four machines tonight. FOUR! The power of it all.
g3.4xlarge is no faster than g3.large but g6.xlarge seems to be twice the speed.
But hard to be sure really coz of the massive variance in time depending on the lighting.
Anyway, great show coming tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I'm trying to do with it but tomorrow's show is the answer. Hide the angry bitter political rant behind a strange CGI tarot show. When the rant comes together well I like it.
https://wordcloudtarot.com/@wordcloudtarot/statuses/01JYFF0GQV1680Z0VG0YTFZDTP

∩️ Leftist lawmakers gather to answer a question: How to beat the global right?
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-07-31/leftist-lawmakers-from-across-the-hemisphere-gather-to-ask-a-questi…

A conference of leftists wants to know: How to beat the global right?
Political leaders from a dozen countries have gathered in Mexico City to discuss a key question: How can the left win?

Details from Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer’s study of Trump’s cellphone habits have a way of lingering in the mind.
The president’s personal number is “broadly circulated.”
He picks up calls from unknown numbers, and keeps a photograph of his own face on his lock screen.
The Cellphone in Chief is a “portal,” Parker and Scherer write,
but it’s also a mirror, a security blanket, and a vulnerability.
Their short psychological study suggests a man who is occasio…

Trump gambles his presidency on war
If Iran does not agree to peace on Trump’s terms,
the president’s vow that
“there are many targets left”
opened the door to a much deeper and potentially longer conflict.
Already, that prospect is angering some members of his political base.
…

With fateful decision, Trump gambles his presidency on war
Trump rose to power criticizing Middle East wars. Now he may have his own.