Tootfinder

GOP setting 'dangerous precedent' with off-limits [budget reconciliation] move — and it may backfire: House Dems - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/republicans-reconciliation-immigration/

Goed dat we in Nederland zelf aan de slag zijn met GenAI. Ik ben benieuwd hoe GPT-NL, ondanks het minieme budget, beperkte mogelijkheden, maar met kwalitatief hoogwaardige data, gaat presteren in vergelijking met andere beschikbare open weight / opensource modellen.

Nederlands AI-project GPT-NL gaat met vijf klanten proefdraaien
Kunstmatige intelligentie: GPT-NL, dat het Nederlandse antwoord moet zijn op de AI-modellen uit Silicon Valley, zet na twee jaar ontwikkeling zijn eerste stappen in de praktijk. Vijf klanten gaan ermee aan de slag om te kijken wat GPT-NL waard is.

Legendary composer Èliane Radigue died this past week at the age of 94. She was a pioneer of electronic music and many of her compositions expressed her Buddhist practice in their spacious and slow moving sonic fields.
A few years ago I was asked by my friend Audra Wolowiec to respond to Radigue’s beautiful ambient work, L’Îsle Re-Sonante, for Sound American.
#music

Paying Our Great Transportation Security Administration Officers and Employees (Donald J. Trump/The White House)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/03/memorandum-for-the-secretary-of-homeland-security-and-the-director-of-the-office-of-management-and-budget/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260327/p95#a260327p95

Why Pass@k Optimization Can Degrade Pass@1: Prompt Interference in LLM Post-training
Anas Barakat, Souradip Chakraborty, Khushbu Pahwa, Amrit Singh Bedi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21189 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21189 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21189
arXiv:2602.21189v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Pass@k is a widely used performance metric for verifiable large language model tasks, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and short-answer reasoning. It defines success if any of $k$ independently sampled solutions passes a verifier. This multi-sample inference metric has motivated inference-aware fine-tuning methods that directly optimize pass@$k$. However, prior work reports a recurring trade-off: pass@k improves while pass@1 degrades under such methods. This trade-off is practically important because pass@1 often remains a hard operational constraint due to latency and cost budgets, imperfect verifier coverage, and the need for a reliable single-shot fallback. We study the origin of this trade-off and provide a theoretical characterization of when pass@k policy optimization can reduce pass@1 through gradient conflict induced by prompt interference. We show that pass@$k$ policy gradients can conflict with pass@1 gradients because pass@$k$ optimization implicitly reweights prompts toward low-success prompts; when these prompts are what we term negatively interfering, their upweighting can rotate the pass@k update direction away from the pass@1 direction. We illustrate our theoretical findings with large language model experiments on verifiable mathematical reasoning tasks.
toXiv_bot_toot

the charming species icons of https://www.prehistoric-wildlife.com

Of course Trump is killing off libraries & museums: He wants every voter as ignorant as his base. And GOP Congress will let him burn it all to the ground.
You did this to yourselves, Trump voters.
▶️ Trump’s budget would gut local libraries and museums. Congress is not on board. | News From The States

Trump’s budget would gut local libraries and museums. Congress is not on board.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is looking to eliminate funding in fiscal 2027 for the agency that serves as the primary federal funding source for libraries and museums nationwide.But congressional appropriators — who rebuffed similar efforts to gut the agency in fiscal 2026 — expressed little enthusiasm for the proposed cut in interviews with States Newsroom. Groups representing museums and libraries across the country also blasted the president’s proposal.

from my link log —
Bertrand Meyer remembers Tony Hoare.
https://bertrandmeyer.com/2026/03/16/celebrating-tony-hoares-mark-on-computer-science/
saved 2026-03-18

Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science - Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get anywhere close ... Read more

Trump’s economic agenda has created a new level of volatility for the federal budget,
as the Supreme Court ruling against many of his tariffs appeared to create a trillion-dollar hole on Friday morning that Trump quickly said he could fill.
Mr. Trump has reshaped the country’s fiscal situation since he took office last year.
He passed an expensive income tax cut that economists warned could put the already-indebted nation on an even more perilous path.
But he also ins…

Tariff Whiplash Clouds Outlook for Federal Budget
The tariffs thrown out by the Supreme Court had become an important revenue source. President Trump said he could replace that money with other levies.

This is how you judge the Starmer government.
Weapons more important than child health.
No morals. Just panic.
Some of the world’s poorest countries to lose UK aid due to 56% budget cut | Global development | The Guardian
https://www.theguardi…