Tootfinder

Just watched #MagnumPI S1E7, "Never Again, Never Again" & from Vietnam to WWII, I'd forgotten how intense the scripts could be.
But I hated S1's "jazz" opening music. It was canned in S2 for the theme we all know & love, but you can hear the dread original here:

Guy next to me at the cafe I’m working out of this morning gets a call:
“… no we don’t live there anymore… no… no, we don’t live there anymore… are you serious?! [my ears perk up] Is this AI?… It is?!”
Spoke to him afterwards. Apparently “some energy company.” And it was an LLM on the other side. He said it sounded so real (a woman who gave him her name and sounded perfectly normal) until he asked it if it was AI when it responded “yes” and then restarted the script.
*smdh…

4 out of 5 US troops surveyed understand duty to disobey illegal orders:
"'…moral injuries of this operation, I think, will be enduring,'…National Guard member…deployed to quell public unrest over immigration arrests in Los Angeles told The New York Times. 'This is not what…military of our country was designed to do, at all.'"
"…when some troops disobey – even indirectly – others can more easily find…courage to do the same."

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

“The Tudor state scrapped Latin worship and the lyrics and music that went with it were largely discarded. Most of this stuff is lost. But..."
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/aug/16/monastic-music-t…

I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life:
there were unexpected visits from the FBI, subpoenas served, telephones tapped, subversive books wrapped in brown paper and stuffed in the back of closets, hushed conversations (in Yiddish, the household language of secrecy) between my parents.
On the day of my father’s firing, when he called to report the news,
I overheard my mother “congratulate” him in an ironic tone, …

Ukraines Außenminister für schnellen Dreier-Gipfel
Der ukrainische Außenminister Andrij Sybiha fordert nach den neuen nächtlichen russischen Angriffen ein Gipfeltreffen mit den USA und Russland. Ein solches Treffen könne einen Durchbruch auf dem Weg zum Frieden bringen, schreibt der Minister auf der Plattform X. Die Angriffe zeigten, wie entscheidend es sei, das Töten zu beenden, einen dauerhaften Frieden zu erreichen und Sic…
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Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Merz berät mit Partnern über Sicherheitsgarantien ++
Die sogenannte Koalition der Willigen zur Unterstützung der Ukraine spricht heute über Sicherheitsgarantien. Geht es nach dem französischen Präsidenten Macron, könnten sich Putin und Selenskyj in Genf treffen.

LEAF: Knowledge Distillation of Text Embedding Models with Teacher-Aligned Representations
Robin Vujanic, Thomas Rueckstiess
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12539 https://

LEAF: Knowledge Distillation of Text Embedding Models with Teacher-Aligned Representations
We present LEAF ("Lightweight Embedding Alignment Framework"), a knowledge distillation framework for text embedding models. A key distinguishing feature is that our distilled leaf models are aligned to their teacher. In the context of information retrieval, this allows for flexible asymmetric architectures where documents are encoded with the larger teacher model, while queries can be served with the smaller leaf models. We also show that leaf models automatically inherit MRL and robustness to…

#Blakes7 Series B, Episode 10 - Voice from the Past
AVON: You WILL leave it.
GLYND: Why not, it's already served its purpose in uniting us for the common cause. [Blake hands the box to Avon]
BLAKE: Acclaim it for that.
https://

Duplicati is in the process of saving my ass again, but their backup restores are extremely slow.
Their web interface is neat and the handling is more or less intuitive, but I think I'm going back to the rsync & cron script formula.
It's what I've done on my server all my life until I installed Docker, but in this case I'm going back to my simple origins.
#docker