Tootfinder

Google announces Gemma 3 270M, a compact model designed for task-specific fine-tuning with strong capabilities in instruction following and text structuring (Google Developers Blog)
https://developers.googleblog.com/en/introducing-gemma-3-270m/

Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI- Google Developers Blog
Explore Gemma 3 270M, a compact, energy-efficient AI model for task-specific fine-tuning, offering strong instruction-following and production-ready quantization.

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

Psi-Turing Machines: Bounded Introspection for Complexity Barriers and Oracle Separations
Rafig Huseynzade
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08577 https://arxiv.o…

Psi-Turing Machines: Bounded Introspection for Complexity Barriers and Oracle Separations
We introduce Psi-Turing Machines (Psi-TM): classical Turing machines equipped with a constant-depth introspection interface $ ι$ and an explicit per-step information budget $ B(d,n)=c\,d\log_2 n $. With the interface frozen, we develop an information-theoretic lower-bound toolkit: Budget counting, $ Ψ$-Fooling, and $ Ψ$-Fano, with worked examples $ L_k $ and $ L_k^{\mathrm{phase}} $. We prove an oracle-relative separation $ P^Ψ \neq NP^Ψ $ and a strict depth hierarchy, reinforced by an Ant…

An internal BBC review finds that documentary Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, narrated by the child of a Hamas minister, breached an editorial rule on accuracy (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/07/bbc-gaza-how-to-survive-a-warzone-re…

BBC Review Finds ‘Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone’ Broke Accuracy Rule In “Serious” Editorial Failure
BBC publishes internal review into editorial failings on 'Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone,' which was narrated by the child of a Hamas minister.

Vision-driven River Following of UAV via Safe Reinforcement Learning using Semantic Dynamics Model
Zihan Wang, Nina Mahmoudian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09971 https://

Vision-driven River Following of UAV via Safe Reinforcement Learning using Semantic Dynamics Model
Vision-driven autonomous river following by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles is critical for applications such as rescue, surveillance, and environmental monitoring, particularly in dense riverine environments where GPS signals are unreliable. We formalize river following as a coverage control problem in which the reward function is submodular, yielding diminishing returns as more unique river segments are visited, thereby framing the task as a Submodular Markov Decision Process. First, we introduce Ma…

Image reconstruction with the JWST Interferometer
Max Charles, Louis Desdoigts, Benjamin Pope, Peter Tuthill, Dori Blakely, Doug Johnstone, Shrishmoy Ray, K. E. Saavik Ford, Barry McKernan, Anand Sivaramakrishnan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10924

Image reconstruction with the JWST Interferometer
Flying on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) above Earth's turbulent atmosphere, the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) on the NIRISS instrument is the highest-resolution infrared interferometer ever placed in space. However, its performance was found to be limited by non-linear detector systematics, particularly charge migration - or the Brighter-Fatter Effect. Conventional interferometric Fourier observables are degraded by non-linear transformations in the image plane, with the c…

Momentum-Resolved Relaxation-Time Approach for Size-Dependent Conductivity in Anisotropic Metallic Films
YoungJun Lee, Jin Soo Lee, Seungjun Lee, Seoung-Hun Kang, Young-Kyun Kwon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08622

Momentum-Resolved Relaxation-Time Approach for Size-Dependent Conductivity in Anisotropic Metallic Films
Shrinking CMOS interconnect dimensions to the nanometer scale intensifies electron scattering at surfaces, interfaces, and grain boundaries, causing severe conductivity loss and challenging copper-based designs. Here we present a momentum-resolved relaxation time framework that integrates density functional theory with the semiclassical Boltzmann transport equation to predict size-dependent resistivity in metallic thin films. Electron phonon interactions are computed from first principles, and …

Trajectory control of a suspended load with non-stopping flying carriers
Sofia Girardello, Giulia Michieletto, Angelo Cenedese, Antonio Franchi, Chiara Gabellieri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11413

Trajectory control of a suspended load with non-stopping flying carriers
This paper presents the first closed-loop control framework for cooperative payload transportation with non-stopping flying carriers. Building upon grasp-matrix formulations and internal force redundancy, we propose a feedback wrench controller that actively regulates the payload's pose while an optimization layer dynamically shapes internal-force oscillations to guarantee persistent carrier motion. Preliminary experimental results on multirotor UAVs validate the model assumptions, and numerica…

FLOWING: Implicit Neural Flows for Structure-Preserving Morphing
Arthur Bizzi, Matias Grynberg, Vitor Matias, Daniel Perazzo, Jo\~ao Paulo Lima, Luiz Velho, Nuno Gon\c{c}alves, Jo\~ao Pereira, Guilherme Schardong, Tiago Novello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09537

FLOWING: Implicit Neural Flows for Structure-Preserving Morphing
Morphing is a long-standing problem in vision and computer graphics, requiring a time-dependent warping for feature alignment and a blending for smooth interpolation. Recently, multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) have been explored as implicit neural representations (INRs) for modeling such deformations, due to their meshlessness and differentiability; however, extracting coherent and accurate morphings from standard MLPs typically relies on costly regularizations, which often lead to unstable traini…

Internal email: xAI lays off hundreds of data annotation team staffers, following a strategic shift to prioritize specialist AI tutors over generalist roles (Grace Kay/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-xai-layoffs-data-annotators-2025-9

Musk's xAI just laid off hundreds of workers tasked with training Grok
XAI laid off at least 500 of the workers on its data annotation team on Friday night.