Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Ozzy Osbourne:
🎵 Flying High Again
#OzzyOsbourne
https://masterslosey.bandcamp.com/track/flying-high-again-ozzy-osbourne-cover
https://open.spotify.com/track/3VPcxdwwo9TcjAOYZa5ZrP

Swalwell: You were promised lower prices on day one. How many of you are feeling those lower prices?
You were promised an end to all wars on day one. How many of you have seen an end to those wars?
Donald Trump is 0 for 150. He made those promises on day one—and now we’re on day 150.
https://

Overly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.

Oil futures surge following US strikes in Iran (Auzinea Bacon/CNN)
https://cnn.com/2025/06/22/business/oil-futures-stocks-iran
http://www.memeorandum.com/250622/p72#a250622p72

Dream Destroyer – the found is feeling again
- #improvisation as a source of #composing -
https://

Dream Destroyer - the found is feeling again
Stan Stewart - @muz4now

So, my Valve Index arrived. As you may know, it officially supports Linux.
It works, sort of, but dear god what a mess that was to get working.
Within the span of one evening, I have seen it all: GPU freezing, failing to aquire a DRM lease, firmware updates crashing, latency, and some weird swap chain flickering issue.
It works, though. On Linux. And I have a plethora of paths to get it perfect. This weekend will be awesome.

The Cradle of Civilization
Assyria Babylonia Sumer Persia Elam Medes Parthian
Babylonia - Born Again
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Iy4u3E6iLA
e
DIODATO - Babilonia

Gaze-supported Large Language Model Framework for Bi-directional Human-Robot Interaction
Jens V. R\"uppel, Andrey Rudenko, Tim Schreiter, Martin Magnusson, Achim J. Lilienthal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15729

Gaze-supported Large Language Model Framework for Bi-directional Human-Robot Interaction
The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) creates an exciting potential for flexible, general knowledge-driven Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems for assistive robots. Existing HRI systems demonstrate great progress in interpreting and following user instructions, action generation, and robot task solving. On the other hand, bi-directional, multi-modal, and context-aware support of the user in collaborative tasks still remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present a gaze- …

Extreme value distribution for GRB prompt data -- How unexpected was the BOAT event?
Stefano Covino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14041 https://

Extreme value distribution for GRB prompt data -- How unexpected was the BOAT event?
Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are known to be unpredictable in time and position. A few (observationally) exceptional events have been observed, as GRB221009A that stands out for its fluence and peak flux, being orders of magnitude higher than what measured so far. Analyzing the observed fluence, peak flux or duration distributions typically requires one to assume some scenarios, and the consistency of the observed data with the predictions turns out to be an important model diagnostic. However, it i…

Predicting Perceptual Boundaries in Auditory Streaming using Delay Differential Equations
Asim Alawfi, Farzaneh Darki, Jan Sieber
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14157

Predicting Perceptual Boundaries in Auditory Streaming using Delay Differential Equations
Auditory streaming enables the brain to organize sequences of sounds into perceptually distinct sources, such as following a conversation in a noisy environment. A typical experiment for investigating perceptual boundaries and bistability is to present a subject with a stream containing two alternating tone stimuli. We investigate a model for the processing of such a stream consisting of two identical neural populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. The populations are coupled via delay…