Tootfinder

OK, now, do we believe this?
CISA work not ‘degraded’ by Trump administration cuts, top agency official says
https://cyberscoop.com/cisa-operational-strength-despite-cuts-nicholas-andersen-billington-cybersecurity-summit/

Proponent of Medicaid cuts set to brief House Republicans as they plot another megabill (Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/13/house-medicaid-cuts-brian-blase-00508181
http://www.memeorandum.com/250813/p90#a250813p90

$80 million Cowboy cuts to chase, a 'Sharp defense' is on theway in 2025 https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2025/07/14/cowboys-osa-odighizuwa-sharp-eberflus-defense/85196807007/

Beste Google,
Gewoon niets van die AI fratsen graag.
M. vr.gr.,
G.E. Bruiker
Toch maar even gezocht op 'temporary chat Google'. Naast wat (ongetwijfeld gesponsorde) juich berichten ook het volgende:
Google Gemini is getting creepier | #PCWorld

Zastanawiałem się, o co ludziom tu biega z tym całym "af", i w końcu mnie oświeciło! Oczywiście, że chodzi o "autofokus"!

Un día como hoy en 1954 nacía Neil Tennant, la voz de Pet Shop Boys, quien nos ha hecho bailar por décadas con sus canciones. Hoy celebra 71 años de vida. ¡Feliz Cumpleaños para él!
#NeilTennant #PetShopBoys #CumpleañosRockero

How the US democracy is designed to avoid representation
Right now in the US, a system which proclaims to give each citizen representation, my interests are not represented very well by most of my so-called representatives at any level of government. This is true for a majority of Americans across the political spectrum, and it happens by design. The "founding fathers" were explicit about wanting a system of government that would appear Democratic but which would keep power in the hands of rich white landowners, and they successfully designed exactly that. But how does disenfranchisement work in this system?
First, a two-party system locked in by first-post-the-post winner-takes-all elections immediately destroys representation for everyone who didn't vote for the winner, including those who didn't vote or weren't eligible to vote. Single-day non-holiday elections and prisoner disenfranchisement go a long way towards ensuring working-class people get no say, but much larger is the winner-takes all system. In fact, even people who vote for the winning candidate don't get effective representation if they're really just voting against the opponent as the greater of two evils. In a 51/49 election with 50% turnout, you've immediately ensured that ~75% of eligible voters don't get represented, and with lesser-of-two-evils voting, you create an even wider gap to wedge corporate interests into. Politicians need money to saturate their lesser-of-two-evils message far more than they need to convince any individual voter to support their policies. It's even okay if they get caught lying, cheating, or worse (cough Epstein cough) as long as the other side is also doing those things and you can freeze out new parties.
Second, by design the Senate ensures uneven representation, allowing control of the least-populous half of states to control or at least shut down the legislative process. A rough count suggests 284.6 million live in the 25 most-populous states, while only 54.8 million live in the rest. Currently, counting states with divided representation as two half-states with half as much population, 157.8 million people are represented by 53 Republican sensors, while 180.5 million people get only 45 seats of Democratic representation. This isn't an anti-Democrat bias, it's a bias towards less-populous states, whose residents get more than their share it political power.
I haven't even talked about gerrymandering yet, or family/faith-based "party loyalty," etc. Overall, the effect is that the number of people whose elected representatives meaningfully represent their interests on any given issue is vanishingly small (like, 10% of people tops), unless you happen to be rich enough to purchase lobbying power or direct access.
If we look at polls, we can see how lack of representation lets congress & the president enact many policies that go against what a majority of the population wants. Things like abortion restrictions, the current ICE raids, and Medicare cuts are deeply unpopular, but they benefit the political class and those who can buy access. These are possible because the system ensures at every step of the way that ordinary people do NOT get the one thing the system promises them: representation in the halls of power.
Okay, but is this a feature of all democracies, inherent in the nature of a majority-decides system? Not exactly...
1/2
#uspol #democracy

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Ryo Aihara, Yoshiki Masuyama, Gordon Wichern, Fran\c{c}ois G. Germain, Jonathan Le Roux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08399

Exploring Disentangled Neural Speech Codecs from Self-Supervised Representations
Neural audio codecs (NACs), which use neural networks to generate compact audio representations, have garnered interest for their applicability to many downstream tasks -- especially quantized codecs due to their compatibility with large language models. However, unlike text, speech conveys not only linguistic content but also rich paralinguistic features. Encoding these elements in an entangled fashion may be suboptimal, as it limits flexibility. For instance, voice conversion (VC) aims to con…

Exactly 20 years ago I published a blog post (which I've edited to adapt to my most recent incarnation of a blog) , with a comparison of tools and frameworks for quite a few technology stacks: Java, .NET, PHP, etc.
This was right at the very early stages of the Cloud, there was no "Big Data", there was certainly no AI, there was no iPhone or Android, Mac OS X releases were still big cats, Ubuntu had just appeared, and social media was just Orkut or MySpace. Enjoy.

State of the Art
This article is a copy of a research work I did today, to draw a map of today’s development technologies.