Tootfinder

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#InTune
- Pianist Boris Giltburg performs live
Petroc Trelawny presents live music in the studio from pianist Boris Giltburg ahead of Cambridge Music Festival, and talks to conductor Tess Jackson about Chromatica Orchestra.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r4bs

Copy-Trasform-Paste: Zero-Shot Object-Object Alignment Guided by Vision-Language and Geometric Constraints
Rotem Gatenyo, Ohad Fried
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14207 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.14207 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.14207
arXiv:2601.14207v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study zero-shot 3D alignment of two given meshes, using a text prompt describing their spatial relation -- an essential capability for content creation and scene assembly. Earlier approaches primarily rely on geometric alignment procedures, while recent work leverages pretrained 2D diffusion models to model language-conditioned object-object spatial relationships. In contrast, we directly optimize the relative pose at test time, updating translation, rotation, and isotropic scale with CLIP-driven gradients via a differentiable renderer, without training a new model. Our framework augments language supervision with geometry-aware objectives: a variant of soft-Iterative Closest Point (ICP) term to encourage surface attachment and a penetration loss to discourage interpenetration. A phased schedule strengthens contact constraints over time, and camera control concentrates the optimization on the interaction region. To enable evaluation, we curate a benchmark containing diverse categories and relations, and compare against baselines. Our method outperforms all alternatives, yielding semantically faithful and physically plausible alignments.
toXiv_bot_toot

Preliminary Nucleus Size Estimate for #Kreutz Sungrazer C/2026 A1 (MAPS): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/ae5220 -> "JWST imagery of the approaching Kreutz sungrazer C/2026 A1 (MAPS) appears sufficient to distinguish the comet’s nucleus from the surrounding dust. Coma model fitting indicates the morphology is compatible with a ∼0.4 km diameter nucleus—likely larger than those of the minor Kreutz fragments routinely discovered with coronagraphs, and comparable to or slightly smaller than that of C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy). However, since C/2026 A1 is the only Kreutz sungrazer whose nucleus has been directly observed, these comparisons should be treated with caution" -> https://groups.io/g/comets-ml/message/35035 / https://scicomm.xyz/@qicheng@cometary.org/116245251072721081

If the first answer to any problem on a Linux system is "oh just update all the packages again" that is evidence of a broken and fragile package management system.
My experience (at home) with Manjaro so far has been absolutely terrible compared to my experience (at work) with CentOS and Rocky Linux.
With Manjaro, working packages regularly break after updates or new installs. It's clearly not managing dependencies properly. And I've had other weird problems o…

I’m curious: is dealing with local dev server ports so cumbersome that you’d give write permission on /etc/hosts to an npm package?
(context: https://port1355.dev/)

Environmental group
"Extinction Rebellion" said on Wednesday it was under federal US investigation
and that some of its members had been visited by FBI agents,
including from the agency’s taskforce on extremism, in the last year.
Asked for comment, the FBI said it could neither confirm nor deny conducting specific investigations, citing justice department policy.
“On the evening of 6 February, a former member of [Extinction Rebellion NYC] was visited by…

RE: #CSUNATC sale is still going!
Because if the conference will give another

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ThroughTheNight
- Handel and Mozart from Switzerland
Countertenor Iestyn Davies joins the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and conductor Robin Ticciati in Handel and Mozart arias. John Shea presents
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r48k

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#ThroughTheNight
- 20 years of the Amaryllis Quartet
In this birthday concert, chamber music classics by Beethoven and Brahms are performed alongside a new work by the Swiss oboist, composer and conductor Heinz Holliger.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002r463