Tootfinder

Looks like the AI4LAM community has entirely abandoned twitter - not a single FF2025 tweet that I could see (having finally remembered that you can search with sites like xcancel)

And at least here in #NYC, I see evidence of people #reading all the time.
1 - Bookstores all over the city have customers at any time of day - they are often full, I struggle to get through to certain shelves at times.
2 - Every time I ride the subway i see someone reading a paper book on the train. Same thing with most times I go to any park or most cafes (at least ones where people sit alone).
3 - I have a friend who works at a major book #publisher and she’s been telling me all year that their sales are some of the best they’ve ever been. They’ve had multiple instances of needing to urgently order more books printed because of certain titles getting way more demand than expected. Those aren’t all celebrity memoirs or newest trendy fantasy either - it often happens with older titles, across genres.
4 - Nearly every acquaintance I have in the city (not just my friends) reads on a regular basis. I hear about books people have read and see them pulling books out all the time - most of the people I know read at least a book a month.

Somehow I ended up having to "explain the German carnival" as the Spanish homework for my upcoming class.
And oh dear, it already doesn't make sense to me to me in English or German, let alone having to describe it in Spanish. 😂

Sonnet 004 - IV
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dos…

You see a detective on the TV and he’s interviewing all the suspects asking them what they were doing on the night of the murder a month ago last Tuesday night.
And on the TV, the suspects all know. Right away.
If you asked me ten years ago though, I’d have had barely any clue. If you’re lucky it’d have been something planned in my calendar but mostly, dunno. Watching TV maybe? No idea what show. Was that a night I was in the pub?
As we all get older this problem increases I’m told. Eventually full on senility sets in.
But what if you have already built the habit to record what you’re doing? To be able to look back and revise and review how you spent your days? An external aid as a crutch to your own forgetful brain’s cortex?
So I started this Exocortex Log over a decade ago and now I can answer: Ten years ago on Tuesday I was having dinner with the guitarist from my band and his girlfriend and they burned the pudding.
The app has been half finished and barely able to even record let alone review for most of that time, but now it’s ready enough that someone else might use it too if they want.
Try it out: #lifeLog #app #memoryAid

Dear Mastodon
Last night I finished the last bit of DLC for Control. Which game, out of the ones that I have hopefully bought but then not played over the last nearly 11 years of looking after children instead of having time for playing computer games, should I play next?

Trump's pardon of Rudi Guilliani
could wind up having a huge effect on election conspirators like Matthew Alan Laiss,
who is accused of voting in both Pennsylvania and Florida in the 2020 election.
According to a federal indictment handed down in September,
Laiss moved from Pennsylvania to Florida in August of 2020 and voted first with a mail-in ballot in Pennsylvania and then in person in Florida on election day.
Both votes were for Trump, Laiss’ lawyers …

A century of glaciers melting, condensed into a few seconds. Impressive video: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQWfDRejcPw/?igsh=Zm51d2Qzb2xtNHM4

Michel Galati on Instagram: "A century of change condensed into a few seconds. In collaboration with @glacionaut I transformed historical and contemporary photographs of Swiss and Austrian glaciers into short AI-animated sequences (Dream Machine by @lumalabsai ). Each clip shows the passage from past to present. The climate has always changed, true, but never this fast. In the past two years alone, Swiss glaciers have lost more than 10% of their total volume (source: Swiss Academy of Sciences). What once took centuries now happens in decades. And yes, the music is The Four Seasons by Vivaldi. An homage to nature, and perhaps a reminder of what we stand to lose. 📍 Photos: @glacionaut 🎥 AI Animation: @flashologo 🗓️ Period: ca. 1875–2024 • 🇮🇹 Un secolo di cambiamento racchiuso in pochi secondi. In collaborazione con @glacionaut, ho trasformato fotografie storiche e contemporanee di alcuni ghiacciai svizzeri e austriaci in brevi sequenze animate con l’intelligenza artificiale (Dream Machine di @lumalabsai). Ogni clip mostra il passaggio dal passato al presente. Il clima è sempre cambiato, è vero, ma mai così rapidamente. Negli ultimi due anni i ghiacciai svizzeri hanno perso oltre il 10% del loro volume (fonte: Swiss Academy of Sciences). Ciò che un tempo accadeva in secoli, oggi avviene in decenni. E sì, la musica è Le Quattro Stagioni di Vivaldi. Un omaggio alla natura e, forse, un promemoria di ciò che rischiamo di perdere. 📍 Foto: @glacionaut 🎥 Animazioni AI: @flashologo 🗓️ Periodo: ca. 1875–2024 • • #ai #dreammachine #ray3 #imagetovideo #glaciers #switzerland #austria #climatchange #history"
44K likes, 814 comments - flashologo on October 28, 2025: "A century of change condensed into a few seconds. In collaboration with @glacionaut I transformed historical and contemporary photographs of Swiss and Austrian glaciers into short AI-animated sequences (Dream Machine by @lumalabsai ). Each clip shows the passage from past to present. The climate has always changed, true, but never this fast. In the past two years alone, Swiss glaciers have lost more than 10% of their total volume (sou…

Learning to See Before Seeing: Demystifying LLM Visual Priors from Language Pre-training
Junlin Han, Shengbang Tong, David Fan, Yufan Ren, Koustuv Sinha, Philip Torr, Filippos Kokkinos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26625

Learning to See Before Seeing: Demystifying LLM Visual Priors from Language Pre-training
Large Language Models (LLMs), despite being trained on text alone, surprisingly develop rich visual priors. These priors allow latent visual capabilities to be unlocked for vision tasks with a relatively small amount of multimodal data, and in some cases, to perform visual tasks without ever having seen an image. Through systematic analysis, we reveal that visual priors-the implicit, emergent knowledge about the visual world acquired during language pre-training-are composed of separable percep…

On the formation of star-forming galaxies having anomalously low-metallicity regions: the role of galaxy interaction and CGM/IGM accretion
Yibo Cao, Zhizheng Pan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.19795

On the formation of star-forming galaxies having anomalously low-metallicity regions: the role of galaxy interaction and CGM/IGM accretion
Gas accretion from both the circum-galactic medium (CGM)/inter-galatic medium (IGM) and interacting companion galaxy can dilute the gas phase metallicity of a galaxy. However, their relative contribution to the chemical evolution of galaxies remains to be quantified. To this end, in this work we study a sample of 510 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) having anomalously low-metallicity (ALM) regions selected from the MaNGA data available in the Data Release 17 from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. ALM r…