Tootfinder

Marques Brownlee plans to shut down his wallpaper app Panels on December 31; Appfigures: it had 900K downloads and $95K in user spending since its 2024 launch (Amanda Silberling/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/01/mkbhds-wallpaper-app-panels-is-shutt…

MKBHD's wallpaper app Panels is shutting down | TechCrunch
"We knew it was niche... and ultimately, we weren't able to turn it into the vision I had," Marques Brownlee said.

Verbose, rich live regions are a sign an author has not tested with browsers, screen readers, and users. This post has an example that I see too often in the wild.
“On ARIA and Experiential Design”
https://jamesscholes.com/2025/10/31/on-aria-and-experiential-design…

"Chimpanzees revise their beliefs if they encounter new information, a hallmark of rationality that was once assumed to be unique to humans"
(Original title: Chimps Are Capable of Human-Like Rational Thought, Breakthrough Study Finds)
https://www.404med…

Syrskyi Asks Budanov for Reinforcements to Defend Pokrovsk: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/01/syrskyi-asks-budanov-for-reinforcements.html

Another great year in music! The Tidal rewind looks great this year.
#music

Börger

Its here. And reviewed in the FT...
Enshittification by @… Cory Doctorow — a manifesto for fixing the internet - https://on.ft.com/3KD1Ir3

@… I prefer a slow, awkward, solo clap thank you

It starts with 'I hope' and will escalate.
JD Vance Hopes His Wife Will Convert To Christianity - Joe.My.God.
https://www.joemygod.com/2025/10/jd-vance-hopes-his-wife-will-convert-to-christianity/

MAGA / Jim Crow / KKK is evil racists scratching their evil racist itches, but it’s not •just• that. It’s authoritarianism. Not even a slippery slope or “opening the door to….” It just is.
There isn’t just a line from white supremacy to dictatorship. They’re the same picture.
3/

No surprise: the top ten most-viewed articles on the English @… in 2025 are basically politics and pop culture.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/2025articles<…

In #Berlin könnte das sogenannte Bäume-Plus-Gesetz der Initiative #VolksentscheidBaum vom Senat am 03.11.2025 angenommen werden.
Sonst droht ein #Volksbegehren. Der Fahrplan dafür …

BaumEntscheid | Berlin
BaumEntscheid Berlin. Wir machen Berlin hitzesicher und wetterfest: mit unserem Volksentscheid für das Klimaanpassungsgesetz

There is never a shortage of critical cybersecurity news, so don't miss today's Metacurity for the most important developments you should know, including
--With cyber grants dead in Congress, states scramble to build their own defenses,
--Cl0p is extorting executives and tech departments for up to $50m,
--Nursery chain hackers remove repugnant posts,
--UK government takes another bite at an Apple backdoor,
--Oz judge continues to protect Qantas lawyers fr…

With cyber grants dead in Congress, states scramble to build their own defenses
Cl0p is extorting executives and tech departments for up to $50m, Nursery chain hackers remove repugnant posts, UK government takes another bite at an Apple backdoor, Oz judge continues to protect Qantas lawyers from hacker retribution, Allianz says attack affected 1.5m customers, much more

Dringende Empfehlung für eine Podcastepisode zur #Politik allgemein und speziell in #Deutschland:
#RONZHEIMER: "Woran Deutschland wirklich krankt. Mit

Die #IDF möchte nicht mehr, dass deren höhere Ränge Smartphones auf Basis von #Android einsetzen.
Ab lieutenant colonel (hier etwa Oberstleutnant) muss ein #iPhone genutzt werden.
Es gab wohl eine Art Androi…

I've spent most of today -- while I really should have been working on other things -- building a little search engine for @yogthos' Cryogen blogging engine, which is what I use for my blog.
I can now generate an index very fast; the index I'm currently generating is too big, and doesn't have enough metadata, and consequently the search side can't return that metadata, but I'm very pleased with progress for one day.

elboob
A site search engine for Cryogen with search on the client side

Vance Says He Hopes His Wife Embraces Christianity, Setting Off Backlash (Amy Qin/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/31/us/politics/usha-jd-vance-christianity-religion-hindu.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251031/p146#a251031p146

Having a very good start at #Arch Summit btw.
We had interesting chats about a lot of stuff. 🥳
Thanks y'all, looking forward to a productive weekend now!

@… Non mais, t'as vu mes pecs, mon lapin? Mates- moi cette musculature de rêve... Des heures d'entraînement ! Ah tu fais moins le malin maintenant ! #memecredi

Weekend Reads
* BGP zombie hunting
https://blog.cloudflare.com/going-bgp-zombie-hunting/
* Inside AI data centers

BGP zombies and excessive path hunting
A BGP “zombie” is essentially a route that has become stuck in the Default-Free Zone (DFZ) of the Internet, potentially due to a missed or lost prefix withdrawal. We’ll walk through some situations where BGP zombies are more likely to rise from the dead and wreak havoc.

Californians... please fight Trump & Texas' election rigging & vote YES on Prop 50.
Be sure to verify your vote's been counted at #YesOnProp50

If you have a problem with secureblue being open and honest, we’re not the same.
"secureblue is for those whose first priority is using Linux, and second priority is security. secureblue does not claim to be the most secure option available on the desktop. We are limited in that regard by the current state of desktop Linux standardization, tooling, and upstream security development. What we aim for instead is to be the most secure option for those who already intend to use Linux. …

Datenschutz: Bundesregierung will kleine Änderungen mit großer Wirkung | heise online
https://heise.de/-10965609

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #AfternoonShow
Black Devil:
🎵 « H » Friend
#BlackDevil
https://open.spotify.com/track/6YiW80v7XWpfeYsIjs4EGi

Mais um trafulha no partido dos trafulhas.
https://masto.pt/@EsquerdaNet/115305280336973343

Esquerda.Net (@EsquerdaNet@masto.pt)
Attached: 1 image Deputado do Chega apanhado a violar estatuto em ajuste direto milionário: José Dotti, líder da distrital de Santarém do Chega, já era deputado quando celebrou com uma Junta de Freguesia um contrato por ajuste direto no valor de dezenas de milhares de euros. https://www.esquerda.net/artigo/deputado-do-chega-apanhado-violar-estatuto-em-ajuste-direto-milionario/96195?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

RE: https://masto.ai/@rbreich/115814801992858689
Why @… is hopeful for #2026.

#LB Esse gambito do Halloween eu não conhecia.
https://mastodon.online/@lichess/115471199915421638

On this hallowed of eves, I face the greatest terror:
Open Enrollment.

LinkedIn seems to be selling/sharing email addresses with random spammers now, ugh. Can't say I'm surprised, but it's still annoying.

Pewnym świadectwem kultury technicznej są kody QR. Zwłaszcza wówczas, kiedy spotykamy albo szalenie złożone kody, świadczące o długim adresie URL, albo kody z adresem skróconym przez zewnętrzny serwis. Rzadko kto dzisiaj po prostu przygotowuje własny krótki adres bądź przekierowanie na potrzeby takiego kodu.
#QRcode

Well. This seems like good news:
«In this study, we evaluated 57 synthetic carbohydrate receptors (SCRs) for antiviral activity in cellulo using pseudotyped virus particles (PVPs) from six high-risk viruses across three families: Paramyxoviridae, Filoviridae, and Coronaviridae. Four SCRs inhibited all tested PVPs, and their efficacy was confirmed against live viruses including SARS-CoV-2, MERS-CoV, EBOV, MARV, NiV, and HeV. Notably, SCR005 and SCR007, which exhibited minimal toxicity, …

Love to look at a customer console and see
Booting `CentOS (2.6.32-71.el6.i686)'

100gCO2/kWh National Grid CO2 intensity is HIGH wrt last 24h so don't run anything that can wait! #CO2

GB Grid Intensity Status - Earth Notes
Live marginal carbon intensity of the grid in Great Britain.

🤾⛹️‍♂️🏃‍♂️ #DHB verlor das zweite Testspiel gegen Island vor der EM knapp und zeigte noch Schwächen – im Angriff oft zu unpräzise, in der Defensive anfällig. Das war vor zwei Tagen besser. Zehn Wochen vor dem Turnierstart in Dänemark, Schweden und Norwegen gilt: Grundordnung stärken Stabilität finden.
#Handball

Shout-out to the guy who replied to this that the USA was never real but always a bully.
He must be great fun at parties.
https://hachyderm.io/@thomasfuchs/115810373152115216

French Judge Investigating Robert Spatz (81) Requests Spain’s Judicial Assistance
https://openbuddhism.org/justice/2025/french-judge-investigating-robert-spatz-81-requests-spains-judicial-assistance/

French Judge Investigating Robert Spatz (81) Requests Spain’s Judicial Assistance
Elodie Emery reports in ‘Le Monde’ that French judge has requested judicial assistance from the Spanish authorities in relation to an ongoing investigation into allegations of physical and sexual…

They say "run for something," and I was super impressed to learn today that this friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend actually is. https://erinpetrey.com/

Erin Petrey for Congress

GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness
Kung-Hsiang Huang, Haoyi Qiu, Yutong Dai, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00536

GUI-KV: Efficient GUI Agents via KV Cache with Spatio-Temporal Awareness
Graphical user interface (GUI) agents built on vision-language models have emerged as a promising approach to automate human-computer workflows. However, they also face the inefficiency challenge as they process long sequences of high-resolution screenshots and solving long-horizon tasks, making inference slow, costly and memory-bound. While key-value (KV) caching can mitigate this, storing the full cache is prohibitive for image-heavy contexts. Existing cache-compression methods are sub-optima…

The grain in the wood
Provides strength and direction
Evidence of growth.
#dailyhaikuprompt - grain
#haiku
#poem

The peril of a White House that flaunts indifference to the law
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/us/politics/white-house-boats-law.html?searchResultPosition=2

The Peril of a White House That Flaunts Its Indifference to the Law
The White House has made no legal argument explaining its bald claim that the president has wartime power to summarily kill people suspected of smuggling drugs.

Oy - I want something BUT you'll have to guess what!
#dogsofmastodon

Instant4D: 4D Gaussian Splatting in Minutes
Zhanpeng Luo, Haoxi Ran, Li Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01119 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01119

Instant4D: 4D Gaussian Splatting in Minutes
Dynamic view synthesis has seen significant advances, yet reconstructing scenes from uncalibrated, casual video remains challenging due to slow optimization and complex parameter estimation. In this work, we present Instant4D, a monocular reconstruction system that leverages native 4D representation to efficiently process casual video sequences within minutes, without calibrated cameras or depth sensors. Our method begins with geometric recovery through deep visual SLAM, followed by grid prunin…

Benchmarking Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection
Julian Oelhaf, Georg Kordowich, Changhun Kim, Paula Andrea P\'erez-Toro, Christian Bergler, Andreas Maier, Johann J\"ager, Siming Bayer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00831

Benchmarking Machine Learning Models for Fault Classification and Localization in Power System Protection
The increasing integration of distributed energy resources (DERs), particularly renewables, poses significant challenges for power system protection, with fault classification (FC) and fault localization (FL) being among the most critical tasks. Conventional protection schemes, based on fixed thresholds, cannot reliably identify and localize short circuits with the increasing complexity of the grid under dynamic conditions. Machine learning (ML) offers a promising alternative; however, systemat…

Interessant, wie es unter so einem Platz mit diversen Weichen aussieht...
https://www.hanning-kahl.de/presse/tramnews/tramnews-archiv/tramnews-114/herzschlag-der-magdeburger-strassenbahn-modernisiert.html

The World Series ends either tonight or tomorrow night, but one thing is for certain: We will host Stickers Club on the Monday after it! Same day, same time, same place as usual! Monday, 6 PM, Victory Cafe at 440 Bloor St. W. here in Toronto. Visit the Luma link for details! https://luma.com/rkwlcbxm

Finished Sashiko Totes
Finished the sashiko panel totes I was making (sashiko hemp leaf pattern with glow in the dark yarn, silver sparkle vinyl piping) and am pretty happy with them. Used a sharpened glovers needle to hand embroider the vinyl.
https://nakatsubyjna.com/2025/10/02/fi

Finished Sashiko Totes
Finished the sashiko panel totes I was making (sashiko hemp leaf pattern with glow in the dark yarn, silver sparkle vinyl piping) and am pretty happy with them. Used a sharpened glovers needle to h…

Solar install done! 41x 440W (peak) panels, commissioned a whopping nine hours before midnight when the tax credits expire lol. The installer definitely cut things close.
I wonder how much juice I'll get out of it this time of year. 100W total? Lol.
We won't find out how well it's really performing until the summer.

"Wertheimer argues that the famous Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act--which protects companies from liability for content posted by users to their websites--needs to be reinterpreted to exclude “platforms that actively promote content using reinforcement learning-based recommendation algorithms.”"
(Original title: Platform Temperance)

Platform Temperance
Notes on a new wave of the Techlash

Putin approves record war spending in 2026 budget, signaling no letup against Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2025/11/30/putin-approves-record-war-spending.html

So, #Trump is threatening people that do not like hate speech, claiming this is #censorship. But at the same time, he is restricting the rights to free speech for anyone who doesn't agree 120% with his opinion.
Here's a great Guest Essay by Nora Benavidez in the

[2025-10-02 Thu (UTC), 17 new articles found for cs.CR Cryptography and Security]
toXiv_bot_toot

Lessons Learned So Far From Verifying the Rust Standard Library (work-in-progress)
Alex Le Blanc, Patrick Lam
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01072 https://arxi…

Lessons Learned So Far From Verifying the Rust Standard Library (work-in-progress)
Although Rust primarily intends to be a safe programming language that excludes undefined behaviour, it provides its users with the escape hatch of unsafe Rust, allowing them to circumvent some of its strong compile-time checks. This additional freedom has some advantages, including potentially more efficient code, which is one of the main reasons why unsafe code is used extensively throughout Rust's standard library. However, because unsafe code also re-opens the door to undefined behaviour, A…

QB Rodgers calls out WRs after 'boo-worthy' loss https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/47159531/aaron-rodgers-calls-wrs-says-steelers-earned-fans-boos

Oxford Economics: the AI boom is lifting global trade, with ~60% of US data center capex spent on imported IT gear, mainly from Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam (Akash Sriram/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/great-ai-buildou…

I have been informed (via email) that Zach Leat has been nominated for the Business Excellence Awards 2026 — please clap 😅

**Federal District Court Issues a Permanent Injunction Barring the U.S. Election Assistance Commission from Altering the Federal Form to Register to Vote to Require Documentary Proof of Citizenship, as Trump Purported to Order** - Election Law Blog
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=152866

Hoje eu apresentei aos meus alunos a letra ρ. E, obviamente, eles também foram iniciados na minha infame piada do Papai Noel dizendo "Feliz Natal, ρ³" rs.

From ⁨⁨⁨⁨⁨#AnnafromUkraine⁩⁩⁩⁩⁩ @AnnafromUkraine@youtube.com
RUSSIA’S OIL EMPIRE COLLAPSE: STRIKES, #ROSNEFT CRASHED, LOWEST OIL PRICES Vlog 1245: War in #Ukraine
The largest

Love how some bullshit "AI" story is on top of The Guardian.
No, "AI" doesn't show signs of self-preservation.
"AI" does not exist. It doesn't have permanence, thoughts, reasoning or consciousness.

New Year new me

Could Lab-Grown Chocolate Be the Future of Halloween? | Portside
https://portside.org/2025-10-31/could-lab-grown-chocolate-be-future-halloween

Please remember: when an officer stops somebody based on racial profiling to challenge their immigration status, the correct and proper term for that is a “Kavanaugh stop.”
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/brett-kavanaugh-stops-immigration-racial-profiling-ice.html

ImageDoctor: Diagnosing Text-to-Image Generation via Grounded Image Reasoning
Yuxiang Guo, Jiang Liu, Ze Wang, Hao Chen, Ximeng Sun, Yang Zhao, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01010

ImageDoctor: Diagnosing Text-to-Image Generation via Grounded Image Reasoning
The rapid advancement of text-to-image (T2I) models has increased the need for reliable human preference modeling, a demand further amplified by recent progress in reinforcement learning for preference alignment. However, existing approaches typically quantify the quality of a generated image using a single scalar, limiting their ability to provide comprehensive and interpretable feedback on image quality. To address this, we introduce ImageDoctor, a unified multi-aspect T2I model evaluation fr…

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.AI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new
[9/10]:
- Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable yet Noisy Rewards under Imperfect Verifiers
Xin-Qiang Cai, Wei Wang, Feng Liu, Tongliang Liu, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama

Knife-wielding suspect shot and killed inside a Ralphs grocery store in Santa Barbara
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-10-30/santa-barbara-shooting-ralphs-suspect

Knife-wielding suspect fatally shot inside a Ralphs grocery store in Santa Barbara
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office released new details on Thursday into the fatal police shooting of a man armed with two knives inside a grocery store last week.

#HeavyMetal 🤘
https://rascalband.bandcamp.com/album/lost-beyond-reason

OpenAI is launching an AI agent to help developers find and verify bugs in their code.
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/30/openai-security-agent-code-threats

OpenAI's new agent hunts software bugs like a human
The new agent, called Aardvark, can detect bugs and propose patches to security teams.

ThinkBrake: Mitigating Overthinking in Tool Reasoning
Minjae Oh, Sangjun Song, Seungkyu Lee, Sungmin Jo, Yohan Jo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00546 https://…

ThinkBrake: Mitigating Overthinking in Tool Reasoning
Small reasoning models (SRMs) often overthink during tool use: they reach a correct tool-argument configuration, then continue reasoning and overwrite it with an incorrect final call. We diagnose overthinking via oracle rollouts that inject at sentence boundaries. On the Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL), this oracle termination lifts average accuracy from 85.8\% to 94.2\% while reducing tokens by 80-94\%, revealing substantial recoverable headroom and potential redundant re…

'Russia is targeting civilians' — Casualties, outages reported following Russian drone strikes on residential buildings in Odesa: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/31/russia-is-targeting-civilians-casualties.html

SoftBank says it has completed a $22.5B investment in OpenAI, finalizing its up to $40B investment commitment announced in March and taking its stake to ~11% (SoftBank Group Corp.)
https://group.softbank/en/news/press/20251231

Completion of Additional $22.5 Billion Investment in OpenAI | SoftBank Group Corp.
SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it has completed an additional investment of $22.5 billion in OpenAI on December 26, 2025 (U.S. time) at the second closing of The Company’s investment of up to $40.0 billion committed on March 31, 2025.

Ališs, antes que eu me esqueça, feliz Beltane/Samhain/Halloween/Dia do Saci para todos os que celebram a data.

This shocks people. They are even more shocked when you show them that computers in general haven't had a positive impact on productivity.
https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/115468156431719681

FCC To Rescind Ruling That Said ISPs Are Required To Secure Their Networks - Slashdot
https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/10/31/237241/fcc-to-rescind-ruling-that-said-isps-are-required-to-secure-their-networks

InfVSR: Breaking Length Limits of Generic Video Super-Resolution
Ziqing Zhang, Kai Liu, Zheng Chen, Xi Li, Yucong Chen, Bingnan Duan, Linghe Kong, Yulun Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00948

InfVSR: Breaking Length Limits of Generic Video Super-Resolution
Real-world videos often extend over thousands of frames. Existing video super-resolution (VSR) approaches, however, face two persistent challenges when processing long sequences: (1) inefficiency due to the heavy cost of multi-step denoising for full-length sequences; and (2) poor scalability hindered by temporal decomposition that causes artifacts and discontinuities. To break these limits, we propose InfVSR, which novelly reformulates VSR as an autoregressive-one-step-diffusion paradigm. This…

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Harry Dong, David Brandfonbrener, Eryk Helenowski, Yun He, Mrinal Kumar, Han Fang, Yuejie Chi, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01143

Generalized Parallel Scaling with Interdependent Generations
Parallel LLM inference scaling involves sampling a set of $N>1$ responses for a single input prompt. However, these $N$ parallel responses tend to be generated independently from each other, partitioning compute resources and leaving potentially useful information in one generation untapped by others. This is in contrast to response length scaling where past computation is used in all future steps. For higher quality responses and response sets, we propose Bridge to generate interdependent resp…

Racist would like not to be remembered forever as a racist.
Mmmm hmmmmmm.

The speedy demolition of the East Wing of the White House last week
has health advocates and Democratic lawmakers seeking answers about
what efforts were taken, if any,
to keep workers and passersby safe from potential plumes of asbestos that could arise from the destruction
https://www.

Senator, advocates demand explanation on asbestos risks from East Wing
Asbestos, which can pose serious health risks when exposed during demolition, was frequently used in projects at the time of the East Wing’s construction.

GRAD: Generative Retrieval-Aligned Demonstration Sampler for Efficient Few-Shot Reasoning
Oussama Gabouj, Kamel Charaf, Ivan Zakazov, Nicolas Baldwin, Robert West
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01165

GRAD: Generative Retrieval-Aligned Demonstration Sampler for Efficient Few-Shot Reasoning
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across diverse tasks, but their effectiveness often depends on the quality of the provided context. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enriches prompts with external information, but its reliance on static databases constrains adaptability and can result in irrelevant demonstrations. In this work, we propose a Generative Retrieval-Aligned Demonstrator (GRAD), a dynamic demonstration-based approach where an LLM model is trained to generat…

According to a video posted on Telegram, Russian Interior Ministry officials arrested the creators of the Medusa malware
https://www.redhotcyber.com/en/post/russian-interior-ministry-officials-arrested-the-creators-of-the-me…

Russian Interior Ministry officials arrested the creators of the Medusa malware
Russian police arrest three young developers of the Medusa malware, used to steal data and breach security systems.

Russian strike hits Sumy high-rise, injuring 11 including four children: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/31/russian-strike-hits-sumy-highrise.html

Filing: Gloo, a developer of AI tools for Christian churches with ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger as its head of technology, seeks an $873.4M valuation in its US IPO (Pritam Biswas/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/technology/gloo-wi

Gather-Scatter Mamba: Accelerating Propagation with Efficient State Space Model
Hyun-kyu Ko, Youbin Kim, Jihyeon Park, Dongheok Park, Gyeongjin Kang, Wonjun Cho, Hyung Yi, Eunbyung Park
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00862

Gather-Scatter Mamba: Accelerating Propagation with Efficient State Space Model
State Space Models (SSMs)-most notably RNNs-have historically played a central role in sequential modeling. Although attention mechanisms such as Transformers have since dominated due to their ability to model global context, their quadratic complexity and limited scalability make them less suited for long sequences. Video super-resolution (VSR) methods have traditionally relied on recurrent architectures to propagate features across frames. However, such approaches suffer from well-known issue…

Unveiling Interesting Insights: Monte Carlo Tree Search for Knowledge Discovery
Pietro Totis, Alberto Pozanco, Daniel Borrajo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00876 https://

Unveiling Interesting Insights: Monte Carlo Tree Search for Knowledge Discovery
Organizations are increasingly focused on leveraging data from their processes to gain insights and drive decision-making. However, converting this data into actionable knowledge remains a difficult and time-consuming task. There is often a gap between the volume of data collected and the ability to process and understand it, which automated knowledge discovery aims to fill. Automated knowledge discovery involves complex open problems, including effectively navigating data, building models to e…

Why?
1. Kavanaugh wrote the opinion that explicitly legalized racial profiling in immigration enforcement.
2. The term “Kavanaugh stops” really, really, really gets under his skin.
3. He’s now kind of trying to walk back the opinion in the hopes that the phrase “Kavanaugh stop” does not become a permanent part of our legal and cultural memory.

French intelligence links Holocaust memorial vandalism to alleged Russian hybrid campaign: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/31/french-intelligence-links-holocaust-memorial.html

Syntax-Guided Diffusion Language Models with User-Integrated Personalization
Ruqian Zhang, Yijiao Zhang, Juan Shen, Zhongyi Zhu, Annie Qu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01028 https:…

Syntax-Guided Diffusion Language Models with User-Integrated Personalization
Large language models have made revolutionary progress in generating human-like text, yet their outputs often tend to be generic, exhibiting insufficient structural diversity, which limits personalized expression. Recent advances in diffusion models have opened new opportunities for improving language generation beyond the limitations of autoregressive paradigms. In this work, we propose a syntax-guided diffusion language model that integrates structural supervision and personalized conditionin…

"An LLM helped me with some task" is not a good argument for these things increasing productivity. Did you also factor in all the cases where it made you slower? Where the output created extra work? And how much of your work/activity is that task?
All bigger studies we know (even those done by Google for example) show a total lack of meaningful productivity gains, especially when looking at a whole organization.
(There are few exceptions: Spam generation might see prod…

Kalshi and Polymarket have partnered with social media accounts purporting to be breaking news reporters, some of which have repeatedly posted false information (Jordy Fee-Platt/The Athletic)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6876922/2

Kalshi, Polymarket are partnering with X accounts claiming to be sports insiders
As Polymarket and Kalshi continue to grow in popularity, they have worked with social media accounts claiming to be breaking news reporters.

Ukraine destroyed 'Oreshnik' missile inside Russian territory, Zelensky says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/31/ukraine-destroyed-oreshnik-missile-inside.html

ZQBA: Zero Query Black-box Adversarial Attack
Joana C. Costa, Tiago Roxo, Hugo Proen\c{c}a, Pedro R. M. In\'acio
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00769 https://

ZQBA: Zero Query Black-box Adversarial Attack
Current black-box adversarial attacks either require multiple queries or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples that can impair the target model performance. However, these methods require training a surrogate loss or diffusion models to produce adversarial samples, which limits their applicability in real-world settings. Thus, we propose a Zero Query Black-box Adversarial (ZQBA) attack that exploits the representations of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to fool other networks. Instead of …

Span-level Detection of AI-generated Scientific Text via Contrastive Learning and Structural Calibration
Zhen Yin, Shenghua Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00890 https://…

Span-level Detection of AI-generated Scientific Text via Contrastive Learning and Structural Calibration
The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in scientific writing raises serious concerns regarding authorship integrity and the reliability of scholarly publications. Existing detection approaches mainly rely on document-level classification or surface-level statistical cues; however, they neglect fine-grained span localization, exhibit weak calibration, and often fail to generalize across disciplines and generators. To address these limitations, we present Sci-SpanDet, a structure-awar…

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the 14,000-person layoffs were due to "culture" and "removing layers" from its internal structure, not really AI or financial factors (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/its-cultu…

Erase to Improve: Erasable Reinforcement Learning for Search-Augmented LLMs
Ziliang Wang, Kang An, Xuhui Zheng, Faqiang Qian, Weikun Zhang, Cijun Ouyang, Jialu Cai, Yuhang Wang, Yichao Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00861

Erase to Improve: Erasable Reinforcement Learning for Search-Augmented LLMs
While search-augmented large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities, their reliability in complex multi-hop reasoning remains limited. This limitation arises from three fundamental challenges: decomposition errors, where tasks are incorrectly broken down; retrieval missing, where key evidence fails to be retrieved; and reasoning errors, where flawed logic propagates through the reasoning chain. A single failure in any of these stages can derail the final answer. We propose Erasa…

Sources: ByteDance plans to spend about $14B on Nvidia's AI chips in 2026, an increase of about 18% from 2025 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3338191/bytedance-pour-u…

Exclusive | ByteDance to pour US$14 billion into Nvidia chips in 2026 as AI demand surges
Chinese unicorn’s computing needs have climbed across its portfolio of popular apps, cloud unit Volcano Engine and large language models.

Exposing the Cracks: Vulnerabilities of Retrieval-Augmented LLM-based Machine Translation
Yanming Sun, Runzhe Zhan, Chi Seng Cheang, Han Wu, Xuebo Liu, Yuyao Niu, Fengying Ye, Kaixin Lan, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00829

Exposing the Cracks: Vulnerabilities of Retrieval-Augmented LLM-based Machine Translation
\textbf{RE}trieval-\textbf{A}ugmented \textbf{L}LM-based \textbf{M}achine \textbf{T}ranslation (REAL-MT) shows promise for knowledge-intensive tasks like idiomatic translation, but its reliability under noisy retrieval contexts remains poorly understood despite this being a common challenge in real-world deployment. To address this gap, we propose a noise synthesis framework and new metrics to evaluate the robustness of REAL-MT systematically. Using this framework, we instantiate REAL-MT with Q…

Filing: Chinese AI startup MiniMax seeks to raise up to ~$538.5M in a Hong Kong IPO, offering 25.4M shares at a price range of ~$19.40 to ~$21.20 per share (Shivangi Lahiri/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific…

SAGE-LD: Towards Scalable and Generalizable End-to-End Language Diarization via Simulated Data Augmentation
Sangmin Lee, Woongjib Choi, Jihyun Kim, Hong-Goo Kang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00582

SAGE-LD: Towards Scalable and Generalizable End-to-End Language Diarization via Simulated Data Augmentation
In this paper, we present a neural spoken language diarization model that supports an unconstrained span of languages within a single framework. Our approach integrates a learnable query-based architecture grounded in multilingual awareness, with large-scale pretraining on simulated code-switching data. By jointly leveraging these two components, our method overcomes the limitations of conventional approaches in data scarcity and architecture optimization, and generalizes effectively to real-wo…