Tootfinder

"Comment le boom des milliardaires alimente les inégalités et menace la démocratie."
"Avec une richesse qui se concentre au sommet, l'Europe doit agir maintenant pour défendre la démocratie et la stabilité économique pour tous."
#TaxTheRich #démocratie

Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era
Fengran Mo, Chuan Meng, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Jian-Yun Nie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10635

Conversational Search: From Fundamentals to Frontiers in the LLM Era
Conversational search enables multi-turn interactions between users and systems to fulfill users' complex information needs. During this interaction, the system should understand the users' search intent within the conversational context and then return the relevant information through a flexible, dialogue-based interface. The recent powerful large language models (LLMs) with capacities of instruction following, content generation, and reasoning, attract significant attention and advancements, …

USC professor Allison Marsh writes this delightful short article for IEEE Spectrum about Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert's British counterparts in Cambridge and how, in their case, a document (the Lighthill Report) precipitated cuts in British AI research funding in ways similar to how funding was temporarily cut in the U.S. following MIT's publishing of Minsky and Papert's "Perceptrons" in 1969.
"Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI"

Freddy the Robot Was the Fall Guy for British AI

Its creator lost a power struggle that led to an AI winter in the 1970s

TrendFolios: A Portfolio Construction Framework for Utilizing Momentum and Trend-Following In a Multi-Asset Portfolio
Joseph Lu, Randall R Rojas, Fiona C. Yeung, Patrick D. Convery
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09330

TrendFolios: A Portfolio Construction Framework for Utilizing Momentum and Trend-Following In a Multi-Asset Portfolio
We design a portfolio construction framework and implement an active investment strategy utilizing momentum and trend-following signals across multiple asset classes and asset class risk factors. We quantify the performance of this strategy to demonstrate its ability to create excess returns above industry standard benchmarks, as well as manage volatility and drawdown risks over a 22+ year period.

1/2 “My input stream is full of it: Fear and loathing and cheerleading and prognosticating on what generative AI means and whether it’s Good or Bad and what we should be doing. All the channels: Blogs and peer-reviewed papers and social-media posts and business-news stories. So there’s lots of AI angst out there, but this is mine. I think the following is a bit unique because it focuses on cost, working backward from there.”

AI Angst

Chinese startups and tech giants are racing to create AI agents for both local and global consumers, following the popularity of Butterfly Effect's Manus (Caiwei Chen/MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/05/1117958/china-ai-a…

Manus has kick-started an AI agent boom in China
A stampede of contenders and copycats has followed the launch of the general AI agent, but China’s internet restrictions have so far made it easier to cater to overseas users.

and, 50 years ago today, following the dead session at ace’s, #JerryGarcia & merl saunders in #berkeley with a mystery drummer, presumably the same as the previous show. bob menke/louis falenga audience tape:

DesignBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MLLM-based Front-end Code Generation
Jingyu Xiao, Ming Wang, Man Ho Lam, Yuxuan Wan, Junliang Liu, Yintong Huo, Michael R. Lyu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06251

DesignBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MLLM-based Front-end Code Generation
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in automated front-end engineering, e.g., generating UI code from visual designs. However, existing front-end UI code generation benchmarks have the following limitations: (1) While framework-based development becomes predominant in modern front-end programming, current benchmarks fail to incorporate mainstream development frameworks. (2) Existing evaluations focus solely on the UI code generation task, whereas p…

Since November 2024, Serbia had a sharp rise in attacks on journalists amid political unrest, including 23 physical assaults and 128 total attacks and threats (Attila Mong/Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2025/06/alarming-escal

Alarming escalation in attacks on journalists amid political crisis in Serbia - Committee to Protect Journalists
Berlin, June 3, 2025—What journalists called a “witch hunt” atmosphere against government critics in Serbia one year ago has since escalated into a rise in attacks and threats against the press, following a deadly railway station collapse in November 2024 that triggered a widespread anti-corruption movement. Initial protests demanding accountability for the tragedy have turned...

and also 50 years ago today, following the dead session at ace’s, #JerryGarcia & merl saunders in #berkeley with a mystery drummer. menke/falenga audience tape, quality getting better as it goes: