Tootfinder

Knowledge Collapse in LLMs: When Fluency Survives but Facts Fail under Recursive Synthetic Training
Figarri Keisha, Zekun Wu, Ze Wang, Adriano Koshiyama, Philip Treleaven
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04796

Knowledge Collapse in LLMs: When Fluency Survives but Facts Fail under Recursive Synthetic Training
Large language models increasingly rely on synthetic data due to human-written content scarcity, yet recursive training on model-generated outputs leads to model collapse, a degenerative process threatening factual reliability. We define knowledge collapse as a distinct three-stage phenomenon where factual accuracy deteriorates while surface fluency persists, creating "confidently wrong" outputs that pose critical risks in accuracy-dependent domains. Through controlled experiments with recursiv…

NBC News Story
How a Harvard initiative studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict collapsed “Nobody came to our defense,” said Hussein Rashid, the program’s former assistant dean, who resigned from his post in January and left at the end of June. “Our students were fantastic — our administrators were cowards.”…The next day, Rashid sent his own scathing resignation letter, accusing Harvard of failing to intervene on behalf of the program against what he viewed as months…

Hussein RashidNBC News Story
How a Harvard initiative studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict collapsed “Nobody came to our defense,” said Hussein Rashid, the program’s former assistant dean, who resigned from his post in Ja…

Correction to Hawking radiation in non-singular gravitational collapse
Hassan Mehmood
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03723 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.03723

Correction to Hawking radiation in non-singular gravitational collapse
Recent studies have shown that quantum gravity introduces important corrections to the process of spherically symmetric gravitational collapse expected from general relativity. In particular, instead of falling into a central singularity, the collapsing body undergoes a bounce and eventually exits its Schwarzschild radius, and this entire process of collapse and rebound can occur in a single asymptotic region. In this paper, particle creation during such non-singular gravitational collapse is s…

Navigating the herd.
(There were 170 highland cattle, sometimes just a few inches away... quite a few blocking the path with their calves and feeling agitated so we had to navigate/bypass through the talus fields higher up, giving these beauties more space...)
#FootpathFriday #LandscapePhotography

Was removing some snails from the greenhouse. Opened skylight to fling them over the fence (into an uncultivated garden) and the window collapsed on my head! No injury as I was wearing a cap and the glass didn't break. Mortice joint had rotted through. Greenhouse was quite old when we arrived 40 years ago and I keep replacing bits.
Luckily I'd kept a partially rotten roof spar so was able to cut it down, using the sound part and joint it to fit.
Never throw anything that …

T CrB - overview of the accretion history, Roche-lobe filling, orbital solution, and radiative modeling: #TCrB are mounting, initiated by the discovery in 2015 of a new enhanced mass-transfer phase (SAP), which is reminiscent of the one preceding the last recorded outburst in 1946. [...] SAP has been caused by an inside-out collapse of the disk, during which the mean accretion rate onto the WD has been ~28x larger than in quiescence. SAP ended in April 2023, but from May 2024 mass-flow has intensively resumed at disk inner radii while the collapse wave reached the outer portions of the disk; the consequent revamp in mass accretion could fill the gap inherited by the fainter 2015-2023 SAP and eventually lead the WD accreted shell to ignition."

📉 Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-falling-birth-population-collapse-based.html

Fears that falling birth rates in the US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
Pronatalism—the belief that low birth rates are a problem that must be reversed—is having a moment in the U.S.

"As demographers who study fertility, family behaviors and childbearing intentions, we can say with certainty that population decline is not imminent, inevitable or necessarily catastrophic."
https://theconversation.com/fear…

Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated.

https://theconversation.com/fears-that-falling-birth-rates-in-us-could-lead-to-population-collapse-are-based-on-faulty-assumptions-261031

Fears that falling birth rates in US could lead to population collapse are based on faulty assumptions
While the changes in population structure that accompany low birth rates are real, the impact of these changes has been dramatically overstated.

Runway and Luma AI say they are talking to robotics and self-driving car companies about their video models and expect these revenue sources to eclipse studios (Rocket Drew/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/runway-luma-target-sales-r…

Runway, Luma Target Sales to Robotics Companies
Imax on Monday announced that it would screen the winning films from Runway’s AI-generated film festival at some of its theaters. Netflix recently said it had used AI to generate a scene in one of its shows for the first time: a building collapsing in The Eternaut, an Argentine sci-fi show.Both ...