Tootfinder

Chargers' Harris 'on track' to play W1, GM says https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46061128/najee-harris-feeling-great-play-vs-chiefs

LOL I stepped away from Mastodon for a couple hours and everybody is VERY MAD that I made jokes about CLIs. I use them every day, guys, it's gonna be okay. I promise I did not hurt Zork's feelings. It is, however, a factual statement that CLIs are not discoverable user interfaces and they are a poor choice for mainstream audiences; this debate was settled long ago.

“A string of bands have pulled out of a UK music festival hours before they were due to perform after Irish band The Mary Wallopers said they were ‘cut off’ for displaying a Palestinian flag.
The Last Dinner Party, Cliffords and The Academic announced on Saturday that they would no longer be performing at the Victorious festival in Portsmouth following Friday’s incident.
…
Rock band The Last Dinner Party said they would boycott the festival in a statement shared on their Inst…

Bands pull out of UK music festival after The Mary Wallopers say they were ‘cut off’
Irish folk group displayed Palestinian flag on stage in Portsmouth

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

"A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. [...] In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers."
"Unlike this mental outsourc…

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and colla…

High temporal stability of niobium superconducting resonators by surface passivation with organophosphonate self-assembled monolayers
Harsh Gupta, Rui Pereira, Leon Koch, Niklas Bruckmoser, Moritz Singer, Benedikt Schoof, Manuel Kompatscher, Stefan Filipp, Marc Tornow
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15957…

High temporal stability of niobium superconducting resonators by surface passivation with organophosphonate self-assembled monolayers
One main limiting factor towards achieving high coherence times in superconducting circuits is two level system (TLS) losses. Mitigating such losses requires controlling the formation of native oxides at the metal-air interface. Here, we report the growth of alkyl-phosphonate self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on Nb thin films following oxide removal. The impact of passivation was evaluated via the performance of coplanar waveguide resonators at 10mK, in terms of quality factor and resonant frequ…

okay is Discord feeling okay because
1. the image I sent
2. the way it showed up in the channel originally
WHO IS THIS MAN??
like after a few seconds it corrected to show what I actually sent but also, HUH???

Hours after flying drones into Poland, Russia condemns Israeli strike on Doha as ‘gross violation’: https://benborges.xyz/2025/09/10/hours-after-flying-drones-into.html

aiexports yet another exec thing
https://mastodon.social/@botgov/115412824363501699

four new exec branch names: abd, americabydesign, nds, ndstudio
https://mastodon.social/@botgov/115067423423754562