Tootfinder

SPAC Insider: SPACs are booming in 2025, with 74 blank check companies going public so far in 2025, raising about $14.7B and beating 2022 total of $13.4B (Lucinda Shen/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/07/18/trump-tariffs-spac-ipo

SPACs hit $14.7 billion this year
74 blank check companies have gone public via deSPAC transaction this year.

Evaluating ASR robustness to spontaneous speech errors: A study of WhisperX using a Speech Error Database
John Alderete, Macarious Kin Fung Hui, Aanchan Mohan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13060

Evaluating ASR robustness to spontaneous speech errors: A study of WhisperX using a Speech Error Database
The Simon Fraser University Speech Error Database (SFUSED) is a public data collection developed for linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Here we demonstrate how its design and annotations can be used to test and evaluate speech recognition models. The database comprises systematically annotated speech errors from spontaneous English speech, with each error tagged for intended and actual error productions. The annotation schema incorporates multiple classificatory dimensions that are of so…

from my link log —
A brief consideration of input shapes for fuzzers.
https://addisoncrump.info/research/consideration-of-input-shapes/
saved 2025-08-17

Europe scorched by wildfires – pictures from space https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2025/aug/14/europe-scorched-by-wildfires-pictures-from-space

Emotions in the archives: study scoops international award https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/emotions-in-the-archives-study-scoops-international-award/

Emotions in the archives: study scoops international award - The National Archives
The editors of a ground-breaking new study about emotions and archives which includes work by a researcher at The National Archives has won a prestigious award. Archives and Emotions: International Dialogues across Past, Present and Future won the Waldo Gifford Leland Award for excellent writing and usefulness for archivists. The study examines the role emotions […]

Sofic conditional mean dimension, relative sofic mean dimension and their localizations
Xianqiang Li, Zhuowei Liu, Xiaofang Luo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12051 https://

Sofic conditional mean dimension, relative sofic mean dimension and their localizations
Let $π:(X,G)\to (Y,G) $ be a factor map between continuous actions of a sofic group $G$, we study sofic conditional mean dimension and relative sofic mean dimension introduced in \cite{LBB2} and \cite{LB}, respectively. We obtain that if $π$ has non-negative sofic conditional mean dimension (resp. relative sofic mean dimension), then $π$ has the maximal zero sofic conditional mean dimension factor (resp. maximal relative zero sofic mean dimension factor). Additionally, the local properties…

The first amendment is measurably under attack in ways it has not been since the presidency of Richard Nixon.
A double standard has also emerged:
if you protest, criticize, or publicly object to the president’s agenda, you’re a target.
Katherine Jacobsen, the project coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists in the US, Canada and Caribbean region, said:
“The thing with the first amendment and free speech in general is that you have to respect everyone’s rig…

Hands-on with Apple's new Speech framework components in the macOS Tahoe beta: the APIs deliver transcription speeds significantly faster than OpenAI's Whisper (John Voorhees/MacStories)
https://www.macstories.net/stories/hands-o…

Hands-On: How Apple’s New Speech APIs Outpace Whisper for Lightning-Fast Transcription
Late last Tuesday night, after watching F1: The Movie at the Steve Jobs Theater, I was driving back from dropping Federico off at his hotel when I got a text: Can you pick me up? It was from my son Finn, who had spent the evening nearby and was stalking me in Find My. Of

Integrating Feedback Loss from Bi-modal Sarcasm Detector for Sarcastic Speech Synthesis
Zhu Li, Yuqing Zhang, Xiyuan Gao, Devraj Raghuvanshi, Nagendra Kumar, Shekhar Nayak, Matt Coler
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13028

Integrating Feedback Loss from Bi-modal Sarcasm Detector for Sarcastic Speech Synthesis
Sarcastic speech synthesis, which involves generating speech that effectively conveys sarcasm, is essential for enhancing natural interactions in applications such as entertainment and human-computer interaction. However, synthesizing sarcastic speech remains a challenge due to the nuanced prosody that characterizes sarcasm, as well as the limited availability of annotated sarcastic speech data. To address these challenges, this study introduces a novel approach that integrates feedback loss fr…

How the Chinese hacking community Honkers, consisting of patriotic self-taught tech enthusiasts, became an integral part of China's cyberespionage apparatus (Kim Zetter/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/china-honkers-elite-cyber-spies/

How China’s Patriotic ‘Honkers’ Became the Nation’s Elite Cyber Spies
A new report traces the history of the early wave of Chinese hackers who became the backbone of the state's espionage apparatus.