Tootfinder

To my mind the following article suggests that the present day "AI" approach is very wrong.
Why? Because biological RI (Real Intelligence) out performs CI (Computer Intelligence) by orders of magnitude on many dimensions: power required (perhaps 20 to 50 watts for the human brain), weight, size, cooling, and ability to innovate in new ways.
Our present digital computer approach to intelligence seems about as apt as trying to power passenger airplanes using onboard coal…

OpenAI Signs $38 Billion Cloud Computing Deal With Amazon
After signing agreements to use computing power from Nvidia, AMD and Oracle, OpenAI is partnering with the world’s largest cloud computing company.

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

Poolformer: Recurrent Networks with Pooling for Long-Sequence Modeling
Daniel Gallo Fern\'andez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02206 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Poolformer: Recurrent Networks with Pooling for Long-Sequence Modeling
Sequence-to-sequence models have become central in Artificial Intelligence, particularly following the introduction of the transformer architecture. While initially developed for Natural Language Processing, these models have demonstrated utility across domains, including Computer Vision. Such models require mechanisms to exchange information along the time dimension, typically using recurrent or self-attention layers. However, self-attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting …

On 31 March 2026, University College London will be hosting a Festschrift Symposium for Professor M. Angela Sasse, to recognise and celebrate her contributions to the field of Computer Science and human-centred security specifically. We are seeking scientific contributions to a volume that will be presented at the event. Submissions will be selected by a committee of her students and colleagues, with accepted papers being made available online following the event.
Submissions are limit…

Improving Discrete Diffusion Unmasking Policies Beyond Explicit Reference Policies
Chunsan Hong, Seonho An, Min-Soo Kim, Jong Chul Ye
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05725 https://…

Improving Discrete Diffusion Unmasking Policies Beyond Explicit Reference Policies
Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a novel framework for language modeling. MDMs generate sentences by iteratively denoising masked sequences, filling in [MASK] tokens step by step. Although MDMs support any-order sampling, performance is highly sensitive to the choice of which position to unmask next. Prior work typically relies on rule-based schedules (e.g., max-confidence, max-margin), which provide ad hoc improvements. In contrast, we replace these heuristics with a lea…

Sparse Neurons Carry Strong Signals of Question Ambiguity in LLMs
Zhuoxuan Zhang, Jinhao Duan, Edward Kim, Kaidi Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13664 https://

Sparse Neurons Carry Strong Signals of Question Ambiguity in LLMs
Ambiguity is pervasive in real-world questions, yet large language models (LLMs) often respond with confident answers rather than seeking clarification. In this work, we show that question ambiguity is linearly encoded in the internal representations of LLMs and can be both detected and controlled at the neuron level. During the model's pre-filling stage, we identify that a small number of neurons, as few as one, encode question ambiguity information. Probes trained on these Ambiguity-Encoding …

TESS Subgiant and Lower Red Giant Asteroseismology in the Continuous Viewing Zones
Sophia Grusnis, Jamie Tayar, Diego Godoy-Rivera
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12513 https://

TESS Subgiant and Lower Red Giant Asteroseismology in the Continuous Viewing Zones
Asteroseismology, the study of stellar oscillations, and stellar modeling both offer profound insights into the fundamental properties and evolution of stars. With pySYD, a new open-source Python package, we were able to constrain the asteroseismic global parameters, $ν_{max}$ and $Δν$, for 82 solar-like oscillating subgiant and lower red giant stars, filling in the region between the Kepler dwarfs and giants. Using asteroseismic scaling relations, we were able to compute seismic masses, rad…

Dispersion of collective modes in spinful fractional quantum Hall states on the sphere
Rakesh K. Dora, Ajit C. Balram
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13100 https://

Dispersion of collective modes in spinful fractional quantum Hall states on the sphere
Collective modes capture the dynamical aspects of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) fluids. Depending on the active degrees of freedom, different types of collective modes can arise in a FQH state. In this work, we consider spinful FQH states in the lowest Landau level (LLL) along the Jain sequence of fillings $ν{=}n/(2n{\pm}1)$ and compute the Coulomb dispersion of their spin-flip and spin-conserving collective modes in the spherical geometry. We use the LLL-projected density-wave and composite f…