Tootfinder

A coalition of European writers, publishers, and others warns that Europe's AI Act is not properly protecting copyrights and is selling out the creative sector (Scott Roxborough/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

European Creators Slam AI Act Implementation, Warn Copyright Protections Are Failing
Europe’s writers, actors, musicians and producers accuse the EU of selling out creative industries in favor of GenAI giants and demand urgent reforms to safeguard IP rights.

#Blakes7 Series D, Episode 07 - Assassin
DAYNA: Feeling any better now? [she serves Tarrant and Avon, reclining on the loungers, then goes over to Soolin and hands her one]
TARRANT: I still think you left it to the last minute on purpose.
https://

"On July 9th, two days after the woman was flung from the ICE SUV, [SF Mayor Daniel] Lurie posted a video to Instagram promoting a new [Labubu] store in Union Square...The timing of the announcement was panned, with nearly every comment under the post questioning Lurie over the ICE raids." #sfPol

San Francisco Protestors Slam Mayor for Tepid Response to ICE Raids
Critics say the mayor and SFPD are policing protestors while protecting federal immigration agents in a city that celebrates its sanctuary status.

Large phonon-drag thermopower polarity reversal in Ba-doped KTaO3
Mohamed Nawwar, Samuel Poage, Tobias Schwaigert, Maria N. Gastiasoro, Salva Salmani-Rezaie, Darrell G. Schlom, Kaveh Ahadi, Brandi L. Wooten, Joseph P. Heremans
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00313

Large phonon-drag thermopower polarity reversal in Ba-doped KTaO3
This study reports the observation of phonon-drag thermopower polarity reversal in Ba-doped KTaO3 thin films, mediated by electron-phonon Umklapp scattering. Epitaxial films with distinct carrier concentrations (3.7 x 10^20 cm^-3 and 4.9 x 10^19 cm^-3) were grown via molecular-beam epitaxy. In heavily doped samples, where the Fermi surface spans 80% of the Brillouin zone, the Umklapp condition is satisfied, reversing electron momentum. This manifests as a sign-reversal in the thermopower around…

Handy am Steuer? Zack, 100 Euro und ein Punkt in Flensburg. 💸 Rheinland-Pfalz will kontrolliert zukünftig noch konsequenter: Nach einer erfolgreichen Testphase soll die Polizei landesweit auf spezielle Handy-Blitzer setzen. 🚗📱
Zum Artikel: https://heise.de/-10673346

Better Than "Better Than Nothing": Design Strategies for Enculturated Empathetic AI Robot Companions for Older Adults
Isabel Pedersen, Andrea Slane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01192

Better Than "Better Than Nothing": Design Strategies for Enculturated Empathetic AI Robot Companions for Older Adults
The paper asserts that emulating empathy in human-robot interaction is a key component to achieve satisfying social, trustworthy, and ethical robot interaction with older people. Following comments from older adult study participants, the paper identifies a gap. Despite the acceptance of robot care scenarios, participants expressed the poor quality of the social aspect. Current human-robot designs, to a certain extent, neglect to include empathy as a theorized design pathway. Using rhetorical t…

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…

An absolute curtain of rain closed in and caused a delay. It soon passed and the game was able to resume.
At 3-2, it was a narrower victory for the home team, the Salem Red Sox, than it ought to have been. The Carolina Mudcats had 6 errors. There could have been a 7th, but the scorers must have felt some charity for a duffed ball at 3B and let it slide.
Single A baseball is that of dream chasers and prospect pitching, not necessarily brilliant talent and discipline.

Just reported that I found a couple of dead Salamander at beginning of August in the #Karwendel . 😞
Luckily I was following the Blog of karwendel.org. Otherwise I wouldn't have known that reports about such incidents should be reported:

Tatterfrau, Tattermann und der Salamander-Fresser - Naturpark Karwendel ⛰️
Eine Pilz-Krankheit breitet sich unter heimischen Salamander- und Molch-Arten aus. Deshalb sollen kranke Alpensalamander gemeldet werden.

DiVeQ: Differentiable Vector Quantization Using the Reparameterization Trick
Mohammad Hassan Vali, Tom B\"ackstr\"om, Arno Solin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26469 https…

DiVeQ: Differentiable Vector Quantization Using the Reparameterization Trick
Vector quantization is common in deep models, yet its hard assignments block gradients and hinder end-to-end training. We propose DiVeQ, which treats quantization as adding an error vector that mimics the quantization distortion, keeping the forward pass hard while letting gradients flow. We also present a space-filling variant (SF-DiVeQ) that assigns to a curve constructed by the lines connecting codewords, resulting in less quantization error and full codebook usage. Both methods train end-to…