Tootfinder

Featuring headliners such as
Robert De Niro,
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey
and journalist Don Lemon,
the “State of the Swamp” address
is set to continue through Trump’s address with live rebuttals.
Attendees were encouraged to dress in green frog attire
as a symbol of defiance,
honoring the frog costumes worn by many anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protesters during its occupation of the city.
It is also intended to reference the “…

State of the Union live updates: Epstein survivors to attend Trump’s address
The speech comes as the president faces an angry and divided Congress, plummeting approval ratings, and a major Supreme Court loss on his tariff policy.

Why Pass@k Optimization Can Degrade Pass@1: Prompt Interference in LLM Post-training
Anas Barakat, Souradip Chakraborty, Khushbu Pahwa, Amrit Singh Bedi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21189 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21189 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21189
arXiv:2602.21189v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pass@k is a widely used performance metric for verifiable large language model tasks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and short-answer reasoning. It defines success if any of $k$ independently sampled solutions passes a verifier. This multi-sample inference metric has motivated inference-aware fine-tuning methods that directly optimize pass@$k$. However, prior work reports a recurring trade-off: pass@k improves while pass@1 degrades under such methods. This trade-off is practically important because pass@1 often remains a hard operational constraint due to latency and cost budgets, imperfect verifier coverage, and the need for a reliable single-shot fallback. We study the origin of this trade-off and provide a theoretical characterization of when pass@k policy optimization can reduce pass@1 through gradient conflict induced by prompt interference. We show that pass@$k$ policy gradients can conflict with pass@1 gradients because pass@$k$ optimization implicitly reweights prompts toward low-success prompts; when these prompts are what we term negatively interfering, their upweighting can rotate the pass@k update direction away from the pass@1 direction. We illustrate our theoretical findings with large language model experiments on verifiable mathematical reasoning tasks.
toXiv_bot_toot

Anyone knows why ARM boards don't use simple things like Open Firmware (#arm <…

Power loom built by T. Larmuth & Co., in Manchester, around 1860 - now at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry.
> "By the early 19th century, new machines like this power loom could make cloth more quickly and cheaply than people. Groups of angry handloom weavers raided cotton mills at night. They burnt and broke power looms to protest against the new technology."
This aspect of the Industrial Revolution is now being breathlessly repeated by those who s…

Google rolls out Gemini 3.1 Pro, which it says is "a step forward in core reasoning", for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers; the .1 increment is a first for Google (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2026/02/19/google-announces-gem…

Google announces Gemini 3.1 Pro for ‘complex problem-solving’
In November, Google introduced Gemini 3 Pro in preview. Google today announced Gemini 3.1 Pro "for tasks where a simple answer isn’t enough."

from my link log —
U 237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW is a symbol for azimuth.
https://ionathan.ch/2022/04/09/angzarr.html
saved 2026-03-11 …

I don’t know the answer to my original question, but maybe it’s as simple as “seize the means of repetition.”
/end

“Asking an AI chatbot a question consumes a great deal more energy than finding the answer via simple web search or calculator. It adds extra demand for no good reason... a bit like driving to the shops in an SUV instead of riding your bike.”
Or driving any kind of car. AI, like cars, aims to reconfigure everyday life in a way that’s vastly more energy-hungry and polluting… and profitable for a few.

This year my plan is not just to write more but also to write a bit out of my usual wheelhouse. Do something that's not just sociotechnological critique.
Not sure how to get the ball rolling there but I really love what Mike Monteiro is doing with his Newsletter ( https://buttondown.com/monteiro ). Bu…

Mike Monteiro’s Good News
“I fell asleep while reading it.” —Jim Christensen Hi. My name is Mike and this is my newsletter. Every week I answer one of your questions. The question can be about anything you want, but I'll only answer it if I think I can give a good answer. To ask a question, just fill out this simple form. Why the hell should I subscribe to this? Well, you shouldn’t. You should go outside and plant a garden. You should start a band! You should go explore every part of the world you’ve ever want…

Veteran tech investor Roger McNamee, recalled asking "Silicon Valley" creator Mike Judge what he was really going for.
Judge answered, “I think Silicon Valley is immersed in a titanic battle between the hippie value system of the Steve Jobs generation and the Ayn Randian libertarian values of the Peter Thiel generation.”
McNamee’s own read on things was less diplomatic:
“Some of us actually, as naïve as it sounds, came here to make the world a better place.
…

The billionaires made a promise -- now some want out | TechCrunch
In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world's