Tootfinder

CBF-AFA: Chunk-Based Multi-SSL Fusion for Automatic Fluency Assessment
Papa S\'ega Wade, Mihai Andries, Ioannis Kanellos, Thierry Moudenc
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20243

CBF-AFA: Chunk-Based Multi-SSL Fusion for Automatic Fluency Assessment
Automatic fluency assessment (AFA) remains challenging, particularly in capturing speech rhythm, pauses, and disfluencies in non-native speakers. We introduce a chunk-based approach integrating self-supervised learning (SSL) models (Wav2Vec2, HuBERT, and WavLM) selected for their complementary strengths in phonetic, prosodic, and noisy speech modeling, with a hierarchical CNN-BiLSTM framework. Speech is segmented into breath-group chunks using Silero voice activity detection (Silero-VAD), enabl…

On many issues, Americans are deeply polarized.
War with Iran isn’t one of them.
An Economist/YouGov poll of U.S. adults taken in the days after Israel’s attack last Friday found that Democrats opposed entering the conflict by a margin of 50 points and Republicans opposed entering it by a margin of 30 points.
Given these numbers, you might think Democratic leaders would be doing everything they can to prevent President Trump from striking Iran without the approval of Cong…

Opinion | Schumer and Jeffries Need to Step Up and Challenge Trump on War Powers
Failing to aggressively defend Congress’s role in authorizing war would be a serious blunder for Democrats.

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 01 - The Way Back
RAVELLA: There's the signal.
[They see a torchlight in the distance. BLAKE and RAVELLA walk into a tunnel and through a metal door. Richie closes the door behind them. DEV TARRANT is outside, still apparently following. RICHIE and RAVELLA escort BLAKE through the room. BLAKE points at some people.]

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

I left ESC right before the final points, afraid of how the mood in the hall might change. A shouting match between Israel and Austria supporters had already started.
I think the right singer won.
#esc2025 #eurovision2025

Before returning to Albion EU I wanted to get at least full T4 gear on Albion Asia plus Avalonian Pickaxe after using learning points to get to T4 mining. Upgrade costs are part of the data.
As of this moment I give a brief glance at all members in the guild "Mastodon Fediverse 100 Tax":
1/7 online. The 1 that's me of course.
Here are my notes on etherpad(attached image)

(1/4) “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in 1 place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, & it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, & a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit & began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusal…

I just got email from Delta Airlines. As of October of this year, flying economy earns you zero frequent flyer miles.
That's fine, it just means that I have to discount competing brands by 5% or something when comparing, since (for instance) economy on JetBlue *will* give me miles (points).

From @… - False UFO stories created by military... sometimes intentionally terrorizing their own soldiers https://n…

How False UFO Stories Were Created - Sometimes Deliberately - by the US Military - Slashdot
Last year's Pentagon report reviewing UFO reports "left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs," reports the Wall Street Journal. "The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinforma...

Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto Collocation Method for Optimal Control via Polynomial Approximations of Differential Equation Vector Fields
Gabriela Abadia-Doyle, William W. Hager, Anil V. Rao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13938

Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto Collocation Method for Optimal Control via Polynomial Approximations of Differential Equation Vector Fields
A new method is described for solving optimal control problems using direct collocation at Legendre-Gauss-Lobatto points. The approach of this paper employs a polynomial approximation of the right-hand side vector field of the differential equations and leads to the following important outcomes. First, the first-order optimality conditions of the LGL integral form are derived, which lead to a full-rank transformed adjoint system and novel costate estimate. Next, a derivative-like form of the LG…