Tootfinder

Masked ICE agents are only the start of the assault on government transparency.
Now, government attorneys that are arguing to deport immigrants are doing so in secret.
The Intercept reports on two separate instances immigration judges in New York City declined to identify the government attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In the first case Judge ShaSha Xu said,
“We’re not really doing names publicly.”
But that’s not really true. Because she *did* ID…

Government Attorneys Now On Board With The Whole Secret Police Thing
Judges are letting government attorneys do the ugly work of mass deportations anonymously.

Hello!
I have a happy favour to ask.
Last year, I had a US intern working with us and she now is looking for help that you- good reader of this account- could give.
(She needs academic survey participants)
Check out her flyer below, click the link, and please RT
http…

Research Study on Data Privacy and Collective Redress
A researcher at University College Dublin wants to conduct anonymous interviews to learn about why you would or would not participate in a legal action to rectify a data protection violation. This information can be used to help nonprofit organizations better represent you when organizations violate your data protection rights. Provide your email to receive more information. All personally identifiable information will be deleted following completion of the study.

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

Hypothesis: Fediverse users have more capital/financial privileges than on other social media platforms. Let's test it!
How much cash (€) could you realistically make liquid within 1 year? Including selling car, flat, stocks etc. (excluding debts).
Anonymous & honest! (I'm having a discussion with a person from a marketing department...)
After voting, please boost/share to help get more responses! 😊

sp_infectious: Art exhibit dynamic contacts (2011)
This dataset contains the daily dynamic contact networks collected during the Infectious SocioPatterns event that took place at the Science Gallery in Dublin, Ireland, during the artscience exhibition INFECTIOUS: STAY AWAY. Each file in the downloadable package contains a tab-separated list representing the active contacts during 20-second intervals of one day of data collection. Each line has the form “t i j“, where i and j are the a…

The billions and billions of dollars this bill pumps into ICE far exceed any conceivable legitimate need the agency could have, even if you agree with its mission.
This bill takes the same masked, anonymous gunmen who have been kidnapping people off the streets and gives them a budget the size of a military.
This is not about honoring the law. This is not even about immigrants.
This is about creating a police state.
I see no other way to read these numbers.
https://mastodon.world/@MJmusicinears/114764606160963355

Best-of-N through the Smoothing Lens: KL Divergence and Regret Analysis
Gholamali Aminian, Idan Shenfeld, Amir R. Asadi, Ahmad Beirami, Youssef Mroueh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05913

Best-of-N through the Smoothing Lens: KL Divergence and Regret Analysis
A simple yet effective method for inference-time alignment of generative models is Best-of-$N$ (BoN), where $N$ outcomes are sampled from a reference policy, evaluated using a proxy reward model, and the highest-scoring one is selected. While prior work argues that BoN is almost optimal in reward vs KL tradeoffs, the effectiveness of BoN depends critically on the quality of the proxy reward model used for selection. For this purpose, we study BoN through a smooth version known as Soft Best-of-N…

On Monday, scores of scientists at the National Institutes of Health sent their Trump-appointed leader a letter titled the "Bethesda Declaration"
challenging “policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”
It says: “We dissent.”
In a capital where insiders often insist on anonymity to say such things publicly,
92 NIH researchers, program directors, branch chiefs and scientific r…

NIH scientists go public with criticism over Trump cuts
President Donald Trump’s National Institutes of Health director says some employees’ critical letter to him has “fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the NIH has taken.” Monday’s letter from NIH researchers and staffers says the Republican Trump administration’s policies waste public resources and harm people’s health. NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya in his confirmation hearings pledged openness to views that might conflict with his, saying dissent is the “essenc…

Run by an anonymous software engineer,
the twitter account
"Pentagon Pizza Report"
tracks Google data for pizzerias around the military complex in Arlington Virginia.
(Anonymized Google Maps data are aggregated from “timeline” or “location history” on phones, including visits made to the establishments.)
Often posting multiple times a day on X, PPR frequently singles out spikes in pizzeria activity,
-- allowing its 200,000-plus followers to dra…

Pentagon Pizza Report (@PenPizzaReport) on X
Pentagon Pizza Report: Open-source tracking of pizza spot activity around the Pentagon (and other places). Frequent-ish updates on where the lines are long.

In the days before the surprise U.S. attack on Iran, Politico reported that
one man in the Defense Department was having an outsized say on Washington’s Iran strategy:
Erik Kurilla, the hawkish U.S. Central Command leader known as “The Gorilla.”
“He’s a big dude, he’s jacked, he’s exactly this ‘lethality’ look they’re going for,” said an anonymous former official.
So long as military advisors “come across as tough and warfighters,”
the source added, Defense S…

Hypermasculinity Is Driving U.S. Foreign Policy
Trump’s approach to Iran shows that America’s crisis of manhood has hit the global stage.