Tootfinder

U.S. scales back troops on NATO’s eastern flank
The United States has informed its NATO allies that it will scale back its troop presence along Europe’s eastern border with Ukraine as it focuses on security priorities elsewhere in the world, Romania’s defense ministry said on Wednesday.
The U.S. Army later confirmed the move but denied it was a sign of lessened commitment to NATO.
Depending on operations and exercises, around 80,000-100,000 U.S. troops are usually present…

California Sen. Adam Schiff and U.S. Rep. Laura Friedman call on Trump to consider a federal film and TV tax credit, instead of 100% tariffs on foreign films (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Legislators to Trump: Consider a Federal Film and TV Tax Credit Instead
Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Laura Friedman, who are both attempting to pull together bipartisan bills proposing such an incentive, were quick to respond to the president on Monday.

I think we might have locked ourselves into a professionalization trap. Shocking revelation: It's capitalism's fault.
(Original title: The Professionalism Trap)
https://tante.cc/2025/09/24/the-professionalism-trap/

The Professionalism Trap
I’m in the process of rewriting a talk I gave a few weeks ago in order to record it and publish it online. When I mentioned that to a friend who’s a filmmaker and knows how lighting and all that works he offered to help me doing it “right” so it doesn’t look like shit. […]

Rethinking Layer-wise Model Merging through Chain of Merges
Pietro Buzzega, Riccardo Salami, Angelo Porrello, Simone Calderara
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21421 https://

Rethinking Layer-wise Model Merging through Chain of Merges
Fine-tuning pretrained models has become a standard pathway to achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of domains, leading to a proliferation of task-specific model variants. As the number of such specialized modules in-creases, merging them into a unified model without retraining has become a critical challenge. Existing merging techniques often rely on interference heuristics,importance weighting, or activation matching while treating each layer independently, thereby failing…

This Week in Sports Trivia: September 25, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6660002/2025/09/25/this-week-in-sports-trivia-september-25-2025/

FYI, here’s the exact language of 50 U.S.C. § 1702(b) which spells out how media mail is exempt:
https://kind.social/@wbwolf/115103183358864928

E.W. Scripps agrees to sell its Indianapolis ABC affiliate station WRTV to Circle City Broadcasting for $83M; Scripps agreed to sell WFTX for $40M in September (Lucas Manfredi/The Wrap)
https://www.thewrap.com/ew-scripps-wrtv-circle-city-broadcasting-sale/

E.W. Scripps to Sell Indianapolis ABC Affiliate WRTV to Circle City Broadcasting for $83 Million
The deal for the Indianapolis ABC affiliate station will close following receipt of regulatory and other customary approvals

Distinct dimensions for attractors of bi-Lipschitz iterated function systems
Simon Baker, Amlan Banaji, De-Jun Feng, Chun-Kit Lai, Ying Xiong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22084 ht…

Distinct dimensions for attractors of bi-Lipschitz iterated function systems
In this paper, we construct an iterated function system on the line consisting of two bi-Lipschitz contractions whose attractor has distinct lower, Hausdorff, lower box, upper box, and Assouad dimensions, thereby providing negative answers to certain folklore questions. Furthermore, as a by-product of our study of bi-Lipschitz IFSs, we construct IFSs within this family that exhibit interesting fractal behaviour. In particular, we prove the following two statements: (i) There exists a bi-Lipsc…

This Week in Sports Trivia: October 23, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6740733/2025/10/23/this-week-in-sports-trivia-october-23-2025/

This Week in Sports Trivia: August 21, 2025 https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6565023/2025/08/21/this-week-in-sports-trivia-august-21-2025/