Tootfinder

https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/08/noem-terminates-24-fema-workers-failing-address-cyber-vulnerabilities/407807/
Noem terminates 24 FEMA workers for failing to address cyber vulnerabilities

Noem terminates 24 FEMA workers for failing to address cyber vulnerabilities
An internal FEMA email obtained by Nextgov/FCW ordered all agency employees to change their passwords “due to recent cybersecurity incidents and threats.”

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem fires 24 FEMA IT staffers, including the CIO and CISO; DHS says they failed security protocols and let hackers access FEMA networks (David DiMolfetta/Nextgov/FCW)
https://www.nextgov.com/people/2025/08/noe

Noem terminates 24 FEMA workers for failing to address cyber vulnerabilities
An internal FEMA email obtained by Nextgov/FCW ordered all agency employees to change their passwords “due to recent cybersecurity incidents and threats.”

Imgur blocks UK access after the ICO notified it of a possible fine over its handling of kids' data; the ICO calls Imgur's move a "commercial decision" (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/imgur-pulls-out-of-uk…

Imgur pulls out of UK after data regulator warns of fines | TechCrunch
Imgur, one of the web's most popular image sharing and hosting platforms, has shut off access to its site in the U.K., following a notice of a fine by the country's data protection watchdog.

Challenge: "Name 20 female authors you admire, 1 per day"
Day 7:
Lauren Beukes ("rhymes with mucus" as she likes to say)
SciFi novellist, filmmaker, journalist and LGBTQ-ally from S.Africa.
I loved Zoo City, Moxyland and The Shining Girls and I need to catch up on her newer ones. It was fun to meet her at the Edinburgh Int'l Book Festival a few years ago.

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Asher J. Hancock, Xindi Wu, Lihan Zha, Olga Russakovsky, Anirudha Majumdar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22195

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) on robot teleoperation data to create vision-language-action (VLA) models is a promising paradigm for training generalist policies, but it suffers from a fundamental tradeoff: learning to produce actions often diminishes the VLM's foundational reasoning and multimodal understanding, hindering generalization to novel scenarios, instruction following, and semantic understanding. We argue that this catastrophic forgetting is due to a distribution mismatch …

UniAPL: A Unified Adversarial Preference Learning Framework for Instruct-Following
FaQiang Qian, WeiKun Zhang, Ziliang Wang, Kang An, Xuhui Zheng, Liangjian Wen, Mengya Gao, Yong Dai, Yichao Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25148

UniAPL: A Unified Adversarial Preference Learning Framework for Instruct-Following
Shaping powerful LLMs to be beneficial and safe is central to AI alignment. We argue that post-training alignment is fundamentally a unified Preference Learning problem, involving two modalities: demonstrated preferences (e.g., Supervised Fine-Tuning, SFT) and comparative preferences (e.g., Reinforcement Learning, RL).The standard sequential pipeline-SFT followed by RL-is flawed due to a critical distributional mismatch: SFT uses static expert data, but as the policy evolves, its generation dis…

How do Monarch butterflies survive?
I've planted several California native milkweeds - the Monarchs have a definite preference for it. (It's fun to work in the garden and have Monarchs flying around me.)
Eventually the milkweeds are covered by very healthy looking, strikingly patterned caterpillars. The caterpillars consume the milkweed plant until the plant is a leafless hulk. And the caterpillars vanish.
But I have yet to see a chrysalis.
I'm going to…

Imgur blocks UK access after the ICO notified it of a possible fine over its handling of kids' data; the ICO calls Imgur's move a "commercial decision" (Ram Iyer/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/imgur-pulls-out-of-uk…

Imgur pulls out of UK after data regulator warns of fines | TechCrunch
Imgur, one of the web's most popular image sharing and hosting platforms, has shut off access to its site in the U.K., following a notice of a fine by the country's data protection watchdog.

Unveiling ignis fatuus - #Microlightning between microbubbles: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2521255122 -> New theory may at last explain a swamp’s ghostly will-o’-the-wisps: https://www.snexplores.org/article/swamp-gas-methane-will-o-wisp-chemistry = https://www.sciencenews.org/article/spark-will-o-the-wisps - methane bubbles spark tiny zaps of electricity that may ignite cool flames of the gas. (Has nothing - obvious, at least - to do with astronomy ... but fun nonetheless.)

Like just about everyone else I know, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking, reading, and talking about #AI. And, given that I work in fine arts education, it's inevitable I think about how AI affects the arts, and how the arts affect AI.
As part of my work in #ArtsPedagogy, I'm visi…