Tootfinder

https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/nasas-new-mars-mission-these-twin-satellites-could-reveal-how-the-red-planet-lost-its-atmosphere

Chris Krebs compared the Balancer exploit to the scheme from Office Space, where the idea was to skim fractions of a penny off the top of many individual transactions.
Krebs also pointed to the possible use of artificial intelligence in crafting the exploit code as another interesting aspect of the situation.

$120 Million Crypto Hack Blamed on Office Space-Style Exploit
Insert your favorite Office Space quote here.

So AI Datacenters are going to space...
https://research.google/blog/exploring

Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design

Semantic Differentiation in Speech Emotion Recognition: Insights from Descriptive and Expressive Speech Roles
Rongchen Guo, Vincent Francoeur, Isar Nejadgholi, Sylvain Gagnon, Miodrag Bolic
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03060

Semantic Differentiation in Speech Emotion Recognition: Insights from Descriptive and Expressive Speech Roles
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is essential for improving human-computer interaction, yet its accuracy remains constrained by the complexity of emotional nuances in speech. In this study, we distinguish between descriptive semantics, which represents the contextual content of speech, and expressive semantics, which reflects the speaker's emotional state. After watching emotionally charged movie segments, we recorded audio clips of participants describing their experiences, along with the inte…

One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more littoral combat ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost that could reach $100 billion or more.
The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating in the ocean,” one former officer said.
Sailors and officers complain…

The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”
Littoral combat ships were supposed to launch the Navy into the future. Instead they broke down across the globe and many of their weapons never worked. Now the Navy is getting rid of them. One is less than five years old.

As temperatures soar, it’s time to close the green space gap https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/aug/07/temperatures-green-space-gap-urban-extreme-heat

"Spooky but safe: how to decorate for Halloween without harming wildlife"
#Halloween #Wildlife

Spooky but safe: how to decorate for Halloween without harming wildlife | The Optimist Daily
Fake spider webs and pumpkins can put wildlife at risk. Here’s how to celebrate Halloween without creating hazards for birds and small animals.

The super-successful #Juno #Jupiter orbiter may already be switched off, but #NASA won't say: https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/nasas-juno-probe-orbiting-jupiter-may-have-come-to-an-end-but-no-one-can-confirm - the agency has extended Juno's mission multiple times, most recently in 2021, guaranteeing operations through Sept. 30, 2025; that date has now passed, and with the U.S. government shut down, there is no word yet on whether Juno will come out alive on the other side.

Revisiting Direct Speech-to-Text Translation with Speech LLMs: Better Scaling than CoT Prompting?
Oriol Pareras, Gerard I. G\'allego, Federico Costa, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet, Javier Hernando
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03093

Revisiting Direct Speech-to-Text Translation with Speech LLMs: Better Scaling than CoT Prompting?
Recent work on Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) has focused on LLM-based models, introducing the increasingly adopted Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, where the model is guided to first transcribe the speech and then translate it. CoT typically outperforms direct prompting primarily because it can exploit abundant Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Text Translation (T2TT) datasets to explicitly model its steps. In this paper, we systematically compare CoT and Direct prompting unde…

Listening or Reading? Evaluating Speech Awareness in Chain-of-Thought Speech-to-Text Translation
Jacobo Romero-D\'iaz, Gerard I. G\'allego, Oriol Pareras, Federico Costa, Javier Hernando, Cristina Espa\~na-Bonet
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03115

Listening or Reading? Evaluating Speech Awareness in Chain-of-Thought Speech-to-Text Translation
Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) systems built from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Text-to-Text Translation (T2TT) modules face two major limitations: error propagation and the inability to exploit prosodic or other acoustic cues. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has recently been introduced, with the expectation that jointly accessing speech and transcription will overcome these issues. Analyzing CoT through attribution methods, robustness evaluations with corrupted transcripts, and p…