Tootfinder

Anybody have a good source for a ripstop nylon zipper pouch, kinda like a pencil case, that's solidly built and fits comfortably in a cargo pants pocket?
Use case is a tiny pocket first aid kit. Nothing fancy, just a couple of bandaids, single-dose ibuprofen, etc. In the past I've tried a plastic clamshell case that eventually broke (and was uncomfortable), a notched vacuum sealed bag (great until you open it, but not resealable), a ziploc (too flimsy).

The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill.
Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced
Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the "future of tax filing."

The IRS open sourced most of its Direct File tax software on GitHub last week, fulfilling a legal requirement under the SHARE IT Act, despite Intuit pressure (Jason Koebler/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-…

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced
Direct File has been open sourced, and its creators have left government to continue working on the "future of tax filing."

The latest executive order from Trump administration removed the following sentence from a previous executive order.
" e) Open source software plays a critical role in Federal information systems."
🔗 https://www…

Sustaining Select Efforts to Strengthen the Nation's Cybersecurity and Amending Executive Order 13694 and Executive Order 14144
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the International Emergency

#opensource

The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced https://www.404media.co/directfile-open-source-irs-tax-filing-software-turbotax-is-trying-to-kil/

ReasonBridge: Efficient Reasoning Transfer from Closed to Open-Source Language Models
Ziqi Zhong, Xunzhu Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22865 https://

ReasonBridge: Efficient Reasoning Transfer from Closed to Open-Source Language Models
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revealed a significant performance gap between closed-source and open-source models, particularly in tasks requiring complex reasoning and precise instruction following. This paper introduces ReasonBridge, a methodology that efficiently transfers reasoning capabilities from powerful closed-source to open-source models through a novel hierarchical knowledge distillation framework. We develop a tailored dataset Reason1K with only 1,000 care…

Even if “AI” worked (it doesn’t), there’s many reasons why you shouldn’t use it:
1. It’s destroying Internet sites that you love as you use chat bots instead of actually going to sources of information—this will cause them to be less active and eventually shut down.
2. Pollution and water use from server farms cause immediate harm; often—just like other heavy industry—these are built in underprivileged communities and harming poor people. Without any benefits as the big tech companies get tax breaks and don’t pay for power, while workers aren’t from the community but commute in.
3. The basic underlying models of any LLM rely on stolen data, even when specific extra data is obtained legally. Chatbots can’t learn to speak English just by reading open source code.
4. You’re fueling a speculation bubble that is costing many people their jobs—because the illusion of “efficiency” is kept up by firing people and counting that as profit.
5. Whenever you use the great cheat machine in the cloud you’re robbing yourself from doing real research, writing or coding—literally atrophying your brain and making you stupider.
It’s a grift, through and through.

A Framework Leveraging Large Language Models for Autonomous UAV Control in Flying Networks
Diana Nunes, Ricardo Amorim, Pedro Ribeiro, Andr\'e Coelho, Rui Campos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04404

A Framework Leveraging Large Language Models for Autonomous UAV Control in Flying Networks
This paper proposes FLUC, a modular framework that integrates open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) autopilot systems to enable autonomous control in Flying Networks (FNs). FLUC translates high-level natural language commands into executable UAV mission code, bridging the gap between operator intent and UAV behaviour. FLUC is evaluated using three open-source LLMs - Qwen 2.5, Gemma 2, and LLaMA 3.2 - across scenarios involving code generation and mission …

I've been following the #Meshtastic and #meshnetwork hashtags for a few months now. Cool article came out in Wired