Tootfinder

Odd things Ubuntu does
Having just booted a new VM up using the official #Canonical #Ubuntu image on #Azure, I noticed that, during the first boot cycle, it makes a call out to "entropy.ubuntu.com"
This is done by the "polliniate" package which describes itself:
pollinate is an entropy as a service client. It will fetch a random seed from one or more remote servers, and feed those into a (pseudo) random number generator. This is often useful in cloud and virtual machine environments with limited sources of entropy.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/jammy/man1/pollinate.1.html
There's something oddly jarring about this. Not least because this call-out for "supplementary" entropy is done after generating the host's SSH keys.
I hope, hope very much, that someone with Prof in their title from a very well regarded Computer Science department has written a paper suggesting this is ok.

Multi-Robot Strategies for Communication-Constrained Exploration and Electrostatic Anomaly Characterization
Gjosse Zijlstra, Karen L. Aplin, Edmund R. Hunt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.00586

Multi-Robot Strategies for Communication-Constrained Exploration and Electrostatic Anomaly Characterization
Exploration of extreme or remote environments such as Mars is often recognized as an opportunity for multi-robot systems. However, this poses challenges for maintaining robust inter-robot communication without preexisting infrastructure. It may be that robots can only share information when they are physically in close proximity with each other. At the same time, atmospheric phenomena such as dust devils are poorly understood and characterization of their electrostatic properties is of scientif…

3 Possible First Round Scenarios For Raiders GM Tom Telesco 1.0 https://www.yardbarker.com/nfl/articles/3_possible_first_round_scenarios_for_raiders_gm_tom_telesco_10/s1_16460_40035398

3 Possible First Round Scenarios For Raiders GM Tom Telesco 1.0
To say that this year’s NFL draft is pivotal for the Las Vegas Raiders is an annual occurrence now. Be that as it may, with Tom Telesco coming into a post-Dave Ziegler organization, 2024 is indeed crucial. Thankfully, the former Los Angeles Chargers boss has a solid track record in the first round, which leads us to look at some possible first-round selections. It all starts in the trenches for Telesco; why not go that route? Assuming that the Raiders don’t move up, staying put with the 13t…

Replaying Quantum Break, this time on PC. Running and gunning will soon commence, but it's nice to take a 4 am stroll through the university grounds and soak up the Remedy weirdness.
#Control #AlanWake2

it's awesome reading the CIA trying to figure out why those evil communist bastards were trying to reduce working hours
Soviet leaders: we must endeavor in the "interest of the all-round physical and mental development of man"
CIA: we must destroy this evil plot
https://www.

Fake it to make it: Using synthetic data to remedy the data shortage in joint multimodal speech-and-gesture synthesis
Shivam Mehta, Anna Deichler, Jim O'Regan, Birger Mo\"ell, Jonas Beskow, Gustav Eje Henter, Simon Alexanderson
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19622 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.19622
arXiv:2404.19622v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Although humans engaged in face-to-face conversation simultaneously communicate both verbally and non-verbally, methods for joint and unified synthesis of speech audio and co-speech 3D gesture motion from text are a new and emerging field. These technologies hold great promise for more human-like, efficient, expressive, and robust synthetic communication, but are currently held back by the lack of suitably large datasets, as existing methods are trained on parallel data from all constituent modalities. Inspired by student-teacher methods, we propose a straightforward solution to the data shortage, by simply synthesising additional training material. Specifically, we use unimodal synthesis models trained on large datasets to create multimodal (but synthetic) parallel training data, and then pre-train a joint synthesis model on that material. In addition, we propose a new synthesis architecture that adds better and more controllable prosody modelling to the state-of-the-art method in the field. Our results confirm that pre-training on large amounts of synthetic data improves the quality of both the speech and the motion synthesised by the multimodal model, with the proposed architecture yielding further benefits when pre-trained on the synthetic data. See https://shivammehta25.github.io/MAGI/ for example output.

2024 NFL Draft: Cowboys first-round pick OT Tyler Guyton calls coming to Dallas 'dream come true'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/draft/news/2<…

2024 NFL Draft: Cowboys first-round pick OT Tyler Guyton calls coming to Dallas 'dream come true'
Jerry Jones said he hasn't seen anyone as proud to be a Cowboy as Guyton

Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight
The military’s latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic islands in the western Pacific:
These units are designed to be smaller, lighter, more mobile
— and, their leaders argue, more lethal.
Coming out of 20 years of land combat in the Middle East, the Marines are striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could play out across thousands of miles of islands and coas…

Former NFL offensive lineman Korey Cunningham dies at 28 https://theathletic.com/5449677/2024/04/26/nfl-korey-cunningham-obit-death/

Former NFL offensive lineman Korey Cunningham dies at 28
Cunningham played collegiate ball at Cincinnati before being drafted by the Arizona Cardinals in the seventh round in 2018.

Preparing for a China war, the Marines are retooling how they’ll fight
The military’s latest concept for fighting adversaries like China from remote, strategic islands in the western Pacific:
These units are designed to be smaller, lighter, more mobile
— and, their leaders argue, more lethal.
Coming out of 20 years of land combat in the Middle East, the Marines are striving to adapt to a maritime fight that could play out across thousands of miles of islands and coas…