Tootfinder

If you’re vide-coding MVPs (or pre-MVPs?) that you have no intention of taking further and instead releasing them as proofs of concept and moving on to your next soon-to-be-abandoned MVP, understand that you’re a patsy. A shill.
You’re suggesting the LLM is up to the task when you’re really admitting it failed and you’re too lazy to take it further.
Less critical folks won’t understand that and shitty managers pre-disposed to justifying their sunk costs will reference it as a win…

I noticed late last night, by way of discovering pooling water under the sink, that the garbage disposal had gone belly up.
And so today’s task is to replace it, which I don’t really relish doing, but:
"…so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." -Gandalf the Grey
And so, I’m off to the hardware store, having accepted the conditions are what they are and deciding ho…

Multiple responses from DeepSeek's namesake chatbot confirm that the startup has expanded the context window of its flagship AI model from 128K tokens to 1M (Ben Jiang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/arti…

DeepSeek boosts AI model with 10-fold token addition as Zhipu AI unveils GLM-5
The upgrade will allow DeepSeek’s AI model to remember and process more information in a single conversation or task.

EXCLUSIVE: JD Vance's Anti-Fraud Task Force Uncovers $6 Billion In Suspected Fraudulent Government Contracts (Reagan Reese/The Daily Caller)
https://dailycaller.com/2026/04/08/jd-vance-task-force-eliminate-fraud-six-billion-government-contracts-gsa-edward-forst-taxpayer-waste/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260408/p100#a260408p100

The National Lawyers Guild
Military Law Task Force
includes attorneys, legal workers, law students and “Barracks lawyers”
interested in draft, military and veterans issues.
It is a standing project of the National Lawyers Guild.
https://nlgmltf.org/

MLTF - Military Law Task Force - Military Law Task Force

I really dont understand the infatuation people have with this 'task' command, the UX is so so poor.
$ task -l
* build-bundles: Build testing bundles
$ cat taskfile.yaml | yq '.tasks|keys'
- b
- fast-bench
- bench
- bench-graph
....28 more
Ridiculous

BBC sources reflect on Tim Davie's DG tenure, mired in impartiality disputes but succeeding in a cultural transformation, as Matt Brittin takes over on May 18 (Jake Kanter/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2026/04/bbc-tim-davie-legacy-task-ahead-matt-br…

BBC Insiders Reflect On Tim Davie’s Legacy – And The Task Ahead For His Successor
BBC insiders are upbeat about Tim Davie's five years as director general, as the UK broadcaster looks ahead to the arrival of Google's Matt Brittin.

Raiders' Kubiak is Fully Aware of the Task at Hand https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-klint-kubiak-fully-aware-task-at-hand

In der Juristerei wird das Aufkommen der LLMs begeistert gefeiert. Man versucht sich zu profilieren. Man ist vielleicht besorgt, dass die Stundensätze herunter gehen könnten. Aber sonst? Und dann diese Studie, die zeigt, dass bei Benutzung von LLMs die cognitive Kapazität und damit auch die Qualität dauernd nach unten zeigt. Kurz: Ein LLM-Anwalt bietet teure 0815-Soße, die man auch ohne Anwalt haben kann.

Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools). Each completed three sessions under the same condition. In a fourth session, LLM users were reassigned to Brain-only group (LLM-to-Brain), and Brain-only users were reassigned to LLM condition (Brain-to-LLM). A total of 54 participants took part in Sessions 1-3, with 18 completing session 4. We used electroencephalo…

OK..news from the "involuntary admin" front.
Infos I had from my partners mother:
"I can do nothing on my laptop any more. There's always a message 'no permission' when I try X or Y. And it said deleting cookies may help so I tried. But something went wrong and I was afraid to continue"
What I saw when I checked the laptop:
- Firefox icon in task bar and desktop blank
- Chrome icon in task bar and desktop blank
- Virus scanner…

#Archon is the command center for #AI coding assistants — a knowledge & task management backbone exposed as an #MCP server 🤖
🎯 Connect

The task given to #NFDI from the federal and state governments: “The NFDI shall set standards in data management.”
Today, 17 experts from all scientific subject areas, took a giant step forward in the workshop “NFDI-RFC Standardisation Concept” at #KIT in Karlsruhe. Here are two of the questions that we discu…

Fun playing ARC-AGI-3 , puzzles that the most advanced AI-models can only solve for 1% 😀
Illustrates how AI models look extremely smart but are at the same time quite dumb.
#AI

I've just finished a modestly onerous administrative task.
It lead me to think about effort and the 3 legs of my job: research, teaching and admin: While there are intrinsic reasons to do research and teaching to the best of your ability, for admin "good enough" is enough. Focus on efficiency not excellence, where efficiency includes making things work, not causing extra hassle in the medium term.

Hands-on with Gemini task automation on mobile: it's super impressive despite being very slow and failing at some tasks; it can order food, book Ubers, and more (Allison Johnson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/898282/gemini-task-automation-uber…

Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive
Gemini’s task automation feature on the Samsung S26 and Pixel 10 series is an impressive glimpse at what the future of AI assistants could look like.

Do you have a long running calculation freezing up your shiny app? {callr} or {crew} might help: https://discindo.org/post/asynchronous-execution-in-shiny/

I don’t really have a problem with LLM code review, in fact I think that may be one of the places where it is both good at the task and can be ethically justified, IF:
1. Training is ONLY on unencumbered open source software
2. Qualified humans act on the review.
I think (1) is important because the LLM is doing what a sufficiently high-capacity skilled human could do ethically. Reading code to learn from it. A code review doesn’t replicate training data, so copyright isn’…

"...the real question is no longer whether Europe can afford to make the energy transition. It is whether it can afford not to. From a central banking perspective, the answer is clear."
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2026/html/ecb.…

Europe’s fossil fuel dependence poses risks to price stability
The European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the European Union countries which have adopted the euro. Our main task is to maintain price stability in the euro area and so preserve the purchasing power of the single currency.

'He's reinvigorated': A rare long offseason has given Andy Reid time to make changes https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48414312/kansas-city-chiefs-andy-reid-2026-pivotal-season

File uploads with the #Sylius Settings plugin?
In a recent project we needed a way to upload file templates—functionality not provided out of the box—so we leveraged the plugin’s flexibility to extend it.
Read about our insights and why the task turned out to be more complex than anticipated in the latest @…

File uploads with the Sylius Settings plugin | bitExpert
Enhance the Sylius Settings plugin with file upload capabilities using Symfony's Data Transformer feature. Learn how to seamlessly integrate file uploads into your Sylius project with a custom transformer solution.

RE: https://freesewing.social/@Rania/116175514967908052
When I was prioritising my list of people to give to this week -- a task which is always difficult -- @…

AgentCgroup: Understanding and Controlling OS Resources of AI Agents
Yusheng Zheng, Jiakun Fan, Quanzhi Fu, Yiwei Yang, Wei Zhang, Andi Quinn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.09345 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.09345 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.09345
arXiv:2602.09345v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: AI agents are increasingly deployed in multi-tenant cloud environments, where they execute diverse tool calls within sandboxed containers, each call with distinct resource demands and rapid fluctuations. We present a systematic characterization of OS-level resource dynamics in sandboxed AI coding agents, analyzing 144 software engineering tasks from the SWE-rebench benchmark across two LLM models. Our measurements reveal that (1) OS-level execution (tool calls, container and agent initialization) accounts for 56-74% of end-to-end task latency; (2) memory, not CPU, is the concurrency bottleneck; (3) memory spikes are tool-call-driven with a up to 15.4x peak-to-average ratio; and (4) resource demands are highly unpredictable across tasks, runs, and models. Comparing these characteristics against serverless, microservice, and batch workloads, we identify three mismatches in existing resource controls: a granularity mismatch (container-level policies vs. tool-call-level dynamics), a responsiveness mismatch (user-space reaction vs. sub-second unpredictable bursts), and an adaptability mismatch (history-based prediction vs. non-deterministic stateful execution). We propose AgentCgroup , an eBPF-based resource controller that addresses these mismatches through hierarchical cgroup structures aligned with tool-call boundaries, in-kernel enforcement via sched_ext and memcg_bpf_ops, and runtime-adaptive policies driven by in-kernel monitoring. Preliminary evaluation demonstrates improved multi-tenant isolation and reduced resource waste.
toXiv_bot_toot

Yesterday, I got an incredible opportunity to watch Cindy Cohn bring @…'s story to one of its biggest audiences yet, as she did an extraordinary job on the Daily Show, pulling off the unlikely task of making the topic of digital privacy and civil liberties seem fun, engaging and witty. I took the chance to share some reflections — and a couple of behind-the-scenes ph…

Defending Privacy, Daily
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

DOGE 2.0:
Trump brings ‘war on fraud’ into focus with task force of benefits-paying agencies | Federal News Network
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2026/03/trump-brings-war-on-fraud-into-focus-with-task-force-of-benefits-paying-agencies/

OpenAI releases a dedicated Codex app for Windows with native sandboxing and support for PowerShell developer environments, after launching on macOS a month ago (Igor Bonifacic/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-brings-its-codex-coding-app-t…

Vänder på min task-priority list: Väntar på en kollega eftersom han är admin på en server som jag fortf inte kommer åt. Så jag skrev ett bashscript som han kan köra för att lägga mig i sudoers. Svårt att fixa till css på en server när en vare sig kommer in eller får göra ändringar i nano (jag vet, det finns vim också, men det är inte där mitt muskelminne finns)

I realise on the fediverse this is maybe asking for a flaming, but yesterday out of sheer curiosity I tried Claude for a simpleish coding task that I'd been putting off (largely inspired by @… 's latest on #theclimatebrink). The performance of Claude was seriously impressive. I am convinced the AI cycle is more than hype (and have been for a while), the chatbots have been a huge attention hogger, misleadingly so, while the serious work has been done elsewhere. (We are developing ML tools to supplement parts of our climate model workflows).
Now I'm wondering if there is any serious EU competition to Anthropic? - Mistral's codestral perhaps?
Because this kind of performance changes everything and we can't afford to lag behind...
#AIcoding #ML
Edit: here is the climate brink post I mentioned
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-ai-augmented-scientist

"On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand, or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades. Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance."

Things you're able to do in a VFX pipeline but it would suck:
1. work with internal shot names that are different from what the client is using.
2. change version numbers of files sent out to the client to hide your internal number of revisions.
Things that make a good VFX pipeline:
1. have artists work with the same task names ("comp_v03") across shows and have scripts rename files you upload if a client demands it ("cmp_v0003")
The forme…

Genus-0 Surface Parameterization using Spherical Beltrami Differentials
Zhehao Xu, Lok Ming Lui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01589 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01589 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01589
arXiv:2602.01589v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Spherical surface parameterization is a fundamental tool in geometry processing and imaging science. For a genus-0 closed surface, many efficient algorithms can map the surface to the sphere; consequently, a broad class of task-driven genus-0 mapping problems can be reduced to constructing a high-quality spherical self-map. However, existing approaches often face a trade-off between satisfying task objectives (e.g., landmark or feature alignment), maintaining bijectivity, and controlling geometric distortion. We introduce the Spherical Beltrami Differential (SBD), a two-chart representation of quasiconformal self-maps of the sphere, and establish its correspondence with spherical homeomorphisms up to conformal automorphisms. Building on the Spectral Beltrami Network (SBN), we propose a neural optimization framework BOOST that optimizes two Beltrami fields on hemispherical stereographic charts and enforces global consistency through explicit seam-aware constraints. Experiments on large-deformation landmark matching and intensity-based spherical registration demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework. We further apply the method to brain cortical surface registration, aligning sulcal landmarks and jointly matching cortical sulci depth maps, showing improved task fidelity with controlled distortion and robust bijective behavior.
toXiv_bot_toot

New Bingo Boys album just came out today, and of COURSE it's a ripper.
#punk

Approximate Cartesian Tree Matching with Substitutions
Panagiotis Charalampopoulos, Jonas Ellert, Manal Mohamed
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08570 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08570
arXiv:2602.08570v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Cartesian tree of a sequence captures the relative order of the sequence's elements. In recent years, Cartesian tree matching has attracted considerable attention, particularly due to its applications in time series analysis. Consider a text $T$ of length $n$ and a pattern $P$ of length $m$. In the exact Cartesian tree matching problem, the task is to find all length-$m$ fragments of $T$ whose Cartesian tree coincides with the Cartesian tree $CT(P)$ of the pattern. Although the exact version of the problem can be solved in linear time [Park et al., TCS 2020], it remains rather restrictive; for example, it is not robust to outliers in the pattern.
To overcome this limitation, we consider the approximate setting, where the goal is to identify all fragments of $T$ that are close to some string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. In this work, we quantify closeness via the widely used Hamming distance metric. For a given integer parameter $k>0$, we present an algorithm that computes all fragments of $T$ that are at Hamming distance at most $k$ from a string whose Cartesian tree matches $CT(P)$. Our algorithm runs in time $\mathcal O(n \sqrt{m} \cdot k^{2.5})$ for $k \leq m^{1/5}$ and in time $\mathcal O(nk^5)$ for $k \geq m^{1/5}$, thereby improving upon the state-of-the-art $\mathcal O(nmk)$-time algorithm of Kim and Han [TCS 2025] in the regime $k = o(m^{1/4})$.
On the way to our solution, we develop a toolbox of independent interest. First, we introduce a new notion of periodicity in Cartesian trees. Then, we lift multiple well-known combinatorial and algorithmic results for string matching and periodicity in strings to Cartesian tree matching and periodicity in Cartesian trees.
toXiv_bot_toot

Forty years ago, 21 people gathered for the first meeting of what became the Internet Engineering Task Force or #IETF . Every day billions of people use the open standards and technologies developed in the IETF. And nearly 8000 volunteer IETF participants from around the world collaborate in more than 100 working groups evolving those open standards and making the Internet work better!

IETF@40
Forty years ago today, 21 people gathered in San Diego, California for the first meeting of what became the Internet Engineering Task Force.

#Sunstone #browser now remembers your open tabs when you close it and re-opens them the next time you launch it. Another task knocked off the todo list.

New Dutch PM Jetten faces uphill task as minority government installed (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/new-dutch-pm-jetten-faces-uphill-task-minority-government-installed-2026-02-23/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260223/p4#a260223p4

Any #writers on here in groups that have a good system for managing submissions and critiques? like we could do more with tech e.g. a task prioritisation queue, rather than a month for submissions, a month for feedback, which feels clunky
#writing #amwriting

Nicht vergessen: morgen beginnt der FAIR February mit einer Paneldiskussion zum Thema Nachnutzung von Forschungsdaten in digitalen Editionen. 📚👾📖
Am 18.02. folgt dann eine Sitzung (die ich mit hoste 👋) zum Thema Vernetzung (von Forschungsdaten). 🌐🪡🧵💾
Wie überschneiden sich FAIR und LOD? Und wie sieht das in Hinblick auf Forschungsdaten aus? Für mich aktuell recht relevant: BEACONs. Was ist der Status quo und was geht da noch?
Link zur Veranstaltungsseite ( Anmeldung):
…

FAIR February 2026: Veranstaltungsreihe
Viertes FAIR February Meetup: 10 Jahre FAIR-Prinzipien – Let’s discuss FAIR Digital Editions In der Task Area Editions des NFDI-Konsortiums Text+ wird das Know-how digital und interdisziplinär arbeitender Wissenschaftler:innen gebündelt mit dem Ziel, die Forschungsdateninfrastruktur für digitale Editionen zu verbessern. In der 2023 begründeten Veranstaltungsreihe FAIR February beschäftigen wir uns jährlich fokussiert mit den FAIR-Prinzipien Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability…

Don't miss my latest CSO feature that examines how boards don't need more cyber metrics; they need risk signals so they can better understand the exposure, trajectory, and consequences of the threats their organizations face.
Thanks to Richard Bejtlich, Mike Hamilton, Wendy Nather, George Tsantes, and Bernard Brantley for their insights.

Boards don’t need cyber metrics — they need risk signals
Security teams have learned to measure activity. The harder task is turning those measurements into signals directors can use to govern risk.

With #LoveReplicationsWeek just around the corner, let's talk about the new journal in the field: Replication Research (R2)
Repeating important research is an important building block of improving the reliability of research. R2 is turning this into a rewarding task by creating a venue to get these important studies published.
It's a journal aligned with the value…

"A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" -- not in a world of LLMs, though, because whenever you fine tune the LLM to your task, you have to always consider what it has already learned in the initial pre-training.

Raiders Get Compelling Words Over Defensive Coordinator Search https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/compelling-words-defensive-coordinator-search/

AOC: It’s our task to figure out how to claw back what has essentially supercharged this agency into becoming a relentless domestic paramilitary that is also a blank check to Palantir to create facial-recognition scans on US citizens.
Source:
https://reddit.com/comments/1qug0xd

Your task for today:
Opt out of #Copilot, because #Microslop forces you into it soon otherwise.
https://github.com/settings…

Primer to get you started with Optimization and Mathematical Programming in R #rstats

CRAN Task View: Optimization and Mathematical Programming
This CRAN Task View contains a list of packages that offer facilities for solving optimization problems. Although every regression model in statistics solves an optimization problem, they are not part of this view. If you are looking for regression methods, the following views will also contain useful starting points: MachineLearning, Econometrics, Robust Packages are categorized according to the following sections. See also the “Related Links” and “Other Resources” sections at the end.

🎧 Earbuds can be used to monitor brain health
#sensors

Earbuds can be used to monitor brain health
An international research team has uncovered the next frontier in monitoring brain health, and the key is in technology that millions of people are already using every day—earbuds. The world-first study found that commercially available earbuds have the capability to detect and classify brain activity, simply by measuring subtle changes in users' hearing. The team used acoustic sensors in earphones to assess cognitive load—the mental effort that shapes learning, task performance and early c…

Stuart Brandt
Date of Birth. March 8, 1942
Date of Death. February 17, 2026
https://www.independent.com/obits/2026/03/30/stuart-brandt/

Democratizing Federated Learning with Blockchain and Multi-Task Peer Prediction
Leon Witt, Kentaroh Toyoda, Wojciech Samek, Dan Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28434 https://

Structural-Ambiguity-Aware Translation from Natural Language to Signal Temporal Logic
Kosei Fushimi, Kazunobu Serizawa, Junya Ikemoto, Kazumune Hashimoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28426 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28426 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28426
arXiv:2603.28426v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is widely used to specify timed and safety-critical tasks for cyber-physical systems, but writing STL formulas directly is difficult for non-expert users. Natural language (NL) provides a convenient interface, yet its inherent structural ambiguity makes one-to-one translation into STL unreliable. In this paper, we propose an \textit{ambiguity-preserving} method for translating NL task descriptions into STL candidate formulas. The key idea is to retain multiple plausible syntactic analyses instead of forcing a single interpretation at the parsing stage. To this end, we develop a three-stage pipeline based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG): ambiguity-preserving $n$-best parsing, STL-oriented template-based semantic composition, and canonicalization with score aggregation. The proposed method outputs a deduplicated set of STL candidates with plausibility scores, thereby explicitly representing multiple possible formal interpretations of an ambiguous instruction. In contrast to existing one-best NL-to-logic translation methods, the proposed approach is designed to preserve attachment and scope ambiguity. Case studies on representative task descriptions demonstrate that the method generates multiple STL candidates for genuinely ambiguous inputs while collapsing unambiguous or canonically equivalent derivations to a single STL formula.
toXiv_bot_toot

Trump Says He Made Memphis Safer. Locals Told Me It Felt Like 1930s Germany or North Korea. – Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/03/trump-memphis-safe-task-force-local-residents-repressive-police-state/

Even at an extraordinarily smart event as #FOSSBackstage , people keep asking "Yeah but couldn't we do this [task that requires care, understanding and commitment] with generative AI?" and I am f*ing sick of it. If the task could not have been automated before the advent of "AI", then it should not be automated now. Just be a decent person put in the human work alrea…

Age-related neural dynamics revealed by time-domain #fNIRS decoding of audiovisual dual-task processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0166432826000938 …

So I’ve got a new gig of sorts. I’ll be a volunteer photographer for the city parks system. The task will be to take pics of folks participating in various programs in the parks and natural areas run by other volunteers, to try and capture that attendees are having fun, especially the kids. The difficulty level is that I’ve never liked photographing people. Go out of my way to keep them out of shots. I’ve done a couple events now, and still just feel intrusive. Hope it gets easier.

Oh happy task. #acadamicchatter

Space Complexity Dichotomies for Subgraph Finding Problems in the Streaming Model
Yu-Sheng Shih, Meng-Tsung Tsai, Yen-Chu Tsai, Ying-Sian Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08002 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08002 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08002
arXiv:2602.08002v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the space complexity of four variants of the standard subgraph finding problem in the streaming model. Specifically, given an $n$-vertex input graph and a fixed-size pattern graph, we consider two settings: undirected simple graphs, denoted by $G$ and $H$, and oriented graphs, denoted by $\vec{G}$ and $\vec{H}$. Depending on the setting, the task is to decide whether $G$ contains $H$ as a subgraph or as an induced subgraph, or whether $\vec{G}$ contains $\vec{H}$ as a subgraph or as an induced subgraph. Let Sub$(H)$, IndSub$(H)$, Sub$(\vec{H})$, and IndSub$(\vec{H})$ denote these four variants, respectively.
An oriented graph is well-oriented if it admits a bipartition in which every arc is oriented from one part to the other, and a vertex is non-well-oriented if both its in-degree and out-degree are non-zero. For each variant, we obtain a complete dichotomy theorem, briefly summarized as follows.
(1) Sub$(H)$ can be solved by an $\tilde{O}(1)$-pass $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$-space algorithm if and only if $H$ is bipartite.
(2) IndSub$(H)$ can be solved by an $\tilde{O}(1)$-pass $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$-space algorithm if and only if $H \in \{P_3, P_4, co\mbox{-}P_3\}$.
(3) Sub$(\vec{H})$ can be solved by a single-pass $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$-space algorithm if and only if every connected component of $\vec H$ is either a well-oriented bipartite graph or a tree containing at most one non-well-oriented vertex.
(4) IndSub$(\vec{H})$ can be solved by an $\tilde{O}(1)$-pass $n^{2-\Omega(1)}$-space algorithm if and only if the underlying undirected simple graph $H$ is a $co\mbox{-}P_3$.
toXiv_bot_toot

Evaluating #AGENTS.md: Are Repository-Level Context Files Helpful for Coding Agents?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988

Staff memo: Alibaba says it is setting up a new task force to accelerate foundation AI model development, after the resignation of Qwen AI head Lin Junyang (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/alibaba-ceo-confirms-de…

Statistical Query Lower Bounds for Smoothed Agnostic Learning
Ilias Diakonikolas, Daniel M. Kane
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21191 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21191 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21191
arXiv:2602.21191v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the complexity of smoothed agnostic learning, recently introduced by~\cite{CKKMS24}, in which the learner competes with the best classifier in a target class under slight Gaussian perturbations of the inputs. Specifically, we focus on the prototypical task of agnostically learning halfspaces under subgaussian distributions in the smoothed model. The best known upper bound for this problem relies on $L_1$-polynomial regression and has complexity $d^{\tilde{O}(1/\sigma^2) \log(1/\epsilon)}$, where $\sigma$ is the smoothing parameter and $\epsilon$ is the excess error. Our main result is a Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound providing formal evidence that this upper bound is close to best possible. In more detail, we show that (even for Gaussian marginals) any SQ algorithm for smoothed agnostic learning of halfspaces requires complexity $d^{\Omega(1/\sigma^{2} \log(1/\epsilon))}$. This is the first non-trivial lower bound on the complexity of this task and nearly matches the known upper bound. Roughly speaking, we show that applying $L_1$-polynomial regression to a smoothed version of the function is essentially best possible. Our techniques involve finding a moment-matching hard distribution by way of linear programming duality. This dual program corresponds exactly to finding a low-degree approximating polynomial to the smoothed version of the target function (which turns out to be the same condition required for the $L_1$-polynomial regression to work). Our explicit SQ lower bound then comes from proving lower bounds on this approximation degree for the class of halfspaces.
toXiv_bot_toot

I am looking for a website which existed a couple of years ago and listed use cases for #MachineLearning. Next to each use case, papers solving the task were listed including the f1 score or other success metrics.
It was extremely useful to see which approaches can be applied to each use case like document classification, image recognition,

It's been 40 years. I still remember it well. I was in school. It's a few days till my 10th bday. Our (very small, maybe 14 kids) 4th grade class stopped our studies and tuned in the launch. The surreal moment of watching the explosion grow while the announcer calmly continued reporting the stats before realizing there was a problem. The teacher having to explain what we just watched. The day we learned that going to space is still a very difficult task.

Not sure how I feel about Claude now. In a about 15 minutes it finished the task I spent several hours of a trial and error to complete, but was able to describe the problem preety well. At the same time it fucked up a git rebase of a single small commit.

Today I made a 2 line change to a file on GitHub. Copilot suggested a spectacularly incorrect summary of my change for the commit message, so I deleted it, finished the commit, and asked CoPilot “how do I disable CoPilot commit message suggestions.” THAT task was in its wheelhouse. #AIslop

Help us shape the Guardian Climate Forum 2026 #climate

Pentagon identifies 4 soldiers killed by Iranian attack (Jeff Schogol/Task & Purpose)
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-troops-identified-iran/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260303/p131#a260303p131

#today met a friend for lunch, will take weekly meter readings this evening, and I'm back on the recreational optimisation task at the moment!

Gifts to the US President are generally considered to be the property of the United States rather than of the president as a person or the president as an office.
So it seems to me that the US National Archives is now the proud owner of a the physical object of a Nobel Peace Prize.
(Of course, el cheato will try to retain physical possession and we will have to pry it from his cold dead fingers, a task that , I suspect, many of us would find rather appealing.)

Anthropic says it found Opus 4.6 "brings more focus to the most challenging parts of a task without being told to" and "thinks more deeply and more carefully" (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-6

Claude Opus 4.6
We’re upgrading our smartest model. Across agentic coding, computer use, tool use, search, and finance, Opus 4.6 is an industry-leading model, often by wide margin.

Oh well, our upcoming client doesn't provide cc files for each shot. Instead, we need to extract the grading values from an EDL file. Fortunately I've already written a script to do that a few years ago for another show.
The time to write a script might be more than what it takes to do the task manually (here it would be copying values from a text file to an xml file). But it pays off if you have to repeat the task. Even if that is 7 years later.

Welfarist Formulations for Diverse Similarity Search
Siddharth Barman, Nirjhar Das, Shivam Gupta, Kirankumar Shiragur
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.08742 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.08742
arXiv:2602.08742v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Nearest Neighbor Search (NNS) is a fundamental problem in data structures with wide-ranging applications, such as web search, recommendation systems, and, more recently, retrieval-augmented generations (RAG). In such recent applications, in addition to the relevance (similarity) of the returned neighbors, diversity among the neighbors is a central requirement. In this paper, we develop principled welfare-based formulations in NNS for realizing diversity across attributes. Our formulations are based on welfare functions -- from mathematical economics -- that satisfy central diversity (fairness) and relevance (economic efficiency) axioms. With a particular focus on Nash social welfare, we note that our welfare-based formulations provide objective functions that adaptively balance relevance and diversity in a query-dependent manner. Notably, such a balance was not present in the prior constraint-based approach, which forced a fixed level of diversity and optimized for relevance. In addition, our formulation provides a parametric way to control the trade-off between relevance and diversity, providing practitioners with flexibility to tailor search results to task-specific requirements. We develop efficient nearest neighbor algorithms with provable guarantees for the welfare-based objectives. Notably, our algorithm can be applied on top of any standard ANN method (i.e., use standard ANN method as a subroutine) to efficiently find neighbors that approximately maximize our welfare-based objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is practical and substantially improves diversity while maintaining high relevance of the retrieved neighbors.
toXiv_bot_toot

Trump ‌will sign an executive order on Monday to formally launch a task force, led by JD Vance, to "prove" election fraud nationwide
Trump and Vance are scheduled to sign the ⁠order at 3:30 p.m. Eastern Time at the White House, according to the president's schedule

A look at how some teens use popular role-playing chatbots and, for parents, the high stakes task of understanding the impact of the possibly addictive products (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/technol

What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots
Harassing bots with “funny violence.” Confiding about a broken heart. Chatting with a block of cheese. Filling a void of loneliness.

Exploring Performance-Productivity Trade-offs in AMT Runtimes: A Task Bench Study of Itoyori, ItoyoriFBC, HPX, and MPI
Torben R. Lahnor, Mia Reitz, Jonas Posner, Patrick Diehl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.14608

🎧 Here's a short excerpt from this week's #podcast, where I use my own example of addressing procrastination- finally taking action on a task that's been on my list for weeks!
https://youtu.be/KJSaXw4CUEs…

Grok gets it

The Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT) Task Force has published its rules, letting you filter automated rules:
https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/act/rules/?requirements=a,aa&status=approved&imp…

All ACT Rules
Accessibility resources free online from the international standards organization: W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Exploring the use of VLMs for navigation assistance for people with blindness and low vision #LLM

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent #Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks
#LLM …

Trump insiders explode over Stephen Miller's shadow rule... and reveal how 'puppet master' overrides the president: 'He needs to be fired'
Donald Trump's brass-knuckles enforcer Stephen Miller played a pivotal role in Kristi Noem's downfall.
Now her successor, another novice to the Department of Homeland Security, faces an equally perilous task to lead the mass deportation agenda with one of the President's most powerful aides breathing down his n…

Raiders Get Strong Message on Ravens’ Tyler Linderbaum https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/ravens-tyler-linderbaum-free-agency/

Cowboys DC Christian Parker on new scheme: 'You build it around the players' https://www.nfl.com/news/cowboys-dc-christian-parker-new-scheme-you-build-it-around-the-players

Nochmal ein kurzer Reminder für heute um 14 Uhr: https://events.gwdg.de/event/1351/page/406-1822026-fair-netzen
In der zweiten Sitzung des @…

FAIR February 2026: Veranstaltungsreihe
Viertes FAIR February Meetup: 10 Jahre FAIR-Prinzipien – Let’s discuss FAIR Digital Editions In der Task Area Editions des NFDI-Konsortiums Text+ wird das Know-how digital und interdisziplinär arbeitender Wissenschaftler:innen gebündelt mit dem Ziel, die Forschungsdateninfrastruktur für digitale Editionen zu verbessern. In der 2023 begründeten Veranstaltungsreihe FAIR February beschäftigen wir uns jährlich fokussiert mit den FAIR-Prinzipien Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability…

Even at an extraordinarily smart event as #FOSSBackstage , people keep asking "Yeah but couldn't we do this [task that requires care, understanding and commitment] with generative AI?" and I am f*ing sick of it. If the task could not have been automated before the advent of "AI", then it should not be automated now. Just be a decent person put in the human work alrea…

Been another eventful week around the "new" house. Got the shed built. What a pain in the ass metal sheds are. This one was no different. Shout-out to whoever decided it was a great idea to plastic wrap every painted panel like they were PC case panels. I hope you stub a pinky toe every other day for the rest of your life.
With that done, next task was to put up the shelf frames I brought with me. Was able to get 3 shelves cut out of the former back porch ramp plywood. Got 3…

Source: Sam Altman told employees the DOD is willing to let OpenAI build its own "safety stack" and won't force OpenAI to comply if its model refuses a task (Sharon Goldman/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/02/27/openai-in-talks-with-pentago…

Sam Altman tells staff at an all-hands that OpenAI is negotiating a deal with the Pentagon, after Trump orders the end of Anthropic contracts
The negotiations come as rival Anthropic is locked in a more contentious standoff with U.S. defense officials.

Markwayne Mullin Has a Massive Task in Front of Him (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2026-03-24/markwayne-mullin-takes-over-dhs-and-seeks-to-revive-its-image
http://www.memeorandum.com/260324/p58#a260324p58

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CL. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CL/new
[4/5]:
- Retrieving Climate Change Disinformation by Narrative
Upravitelev, Solopova, Jakob, Sahitaj, M\"oller, Schmitt
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22015 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/116283633674519408
- PaperVoyager : Building Interactive Web with Visual Language Models
Dasen Dai, Biao Wu, Meng Fang, Wenhao Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22999 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCL_bot/116289015432093128
- Continual Robot Skill and Task Learning via Dialogue
Weiwei Gu, Suresh Kondepudi, Anmol Gupta, Lixiao Huang, Nakul Gopalan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03166 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_bot/113089412115632702
- Shifting Perspectives: Steering Vectors for Robust Bias Mitigation in LLMs
Zara Siddique, Irtaza Khalid, Liam D. Turner, Luis Espinosa-Anke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05371 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/114136994263573386
- SkillFlow: Scalable and Efficient Agent Skill Retrieval System
Fangzhou Li, Pagkratios Tagkopoulos, Ilias Tagkopoulos
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06188 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/114306773220502860
- Large Language Models for Computer-Aided Design: A Survey
Licheng Zhang, Bach Le, Naveed Akhtar, Siew-Kei Lam, Tuan Ngo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.08137 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/114504972217393639
- Structured Agent Distillation for Large Language Model
Liu, Kong, Dong, Yang, Li, Tang, Yuan, Niu, Zhang, Zhao, Lin, Huang, Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13820 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/114544636506163783
- VLM-3R: Vision-Language Models Augmented with Instruction-Aligned 3D Reconstruction
Fan, Zhang, Li, Zhang, Chen, Hu, Wang, Qu, Zhou, Wang, Yan, Xu, Theiss, Chen, Li, Tu, Wang, Ranjan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20279 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/114578817567171199
- Learning to Diagnose Privately: DP-Powered LLMs for Radiology Report Classification
Bhattacharjee, Tian, Rubin, Lo, Merchant, Hanson, Gounley, Tandon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04450 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCR_bot/114635189706505648
- L-MARS: Legal Multi-Agent Workflow with Orchestrated Reasoning and Agentic Search
Ziqi Wang, Boqin Yuan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.00761 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115140304787881576
- Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking
Han, Huang, Liao, Jiang, Lu, Zhao, Wang, Zhou, Jiang, Liang, Zhou, Sun, Yu, Xiao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23392 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/115293169353788311
- Person-Centric Annotations of LAION-400M: Auditing Bias and Its Transfer to Models
Leander Girrbach, Stephan Alaniz, Genevieve Smith, Trevor Darrell, Zeynep Akata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03721 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115332690912652473
- Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
Zhang, Hu, Upasani, Ma, Hong, Kamanuru, Rainton, Wu, Ji, Li, Thakker, Zou, Olukotun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04618 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115332999596603375
- Mitigating Premature Exploitation in Particle-based Monte Carlo for Inference-Time Scaling
Giannone, Xu, Nayak, Awhad, Sudalairaj, Xu, Srivastava
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05825 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115338159696513898
- Complete asymptotic type-token relationship for growing complex systems with inverse power-law co...
Pablo Rosillo-Rodes, Laurent H\'ebert-Dufresne, Peter Sheridan Dodds
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02069 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_physicssocph_bot/115496283627867809
- ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actions
Sandeep Routray, Hengkai Pan, Unnat Jain, Shikhar Bahl, Deepak Pathak
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07732 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csRO_bot/115535941444003568
- AISAC: An Integrated multi-agent System for Transparent, Retrieval-Grounded Scientific Assistance
Chandrachur Bhattacharya, Sibendu Som
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.14043
- VideoARM: Agentic Reasoning over Hierarchical Memory for Long-Form Video Understanding
Yufei Yin, Qianke Meng, Minghao Chen, Jiajun Ding, Zhenwei Shao, Zhou Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12360 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115729238732682644
- RadImageNet-VQA: A Large-Scale CT and MRI Dataset for Radiologic Visual Question Answering
L\'eo Butsanets, Charles Corbi\`ere, Julien Khlaut, Pierre Manceron, Corentin Dancette
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17396 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_bot/115762705911757243
- Measuring all the noises of LLM Evals
Sida Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.21326 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csLG_bot/115779597137785637
toXiv_bot_toot

JUST-DUB-IT: Video Dubbing via Joint Audio-Visual Diffusion
Anthony Chen, Naomi Ken Korem, Tavi Halperin, Matan Ben Yosef, Urska Jelercic, Ofir Bibi, Or Patashnik, Daniel Cohen-Or
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22143 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22143 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22143
arXiv:2601.22143v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Audio-Visual Foundation Models, which are pretrained to jointly generate sound and visual content, have recently shown an unprecedented ability to model multi-modal generation and editing, opening new opportunities for downstream tasks. Among these tasks, video dubbing could greatly benefit from such priors, yet most existing solutions still rely on complex, task-specific pipelines that struggle in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a single-model approach that adapts a foundational audio-video diffusion model for video-to-video dubbing via a lightweight LoRA. The LoRA enables the model to condition on an input audio-video while jointly generating translated audio and synchronized facial motion. To train this LoRA, we leverage the generative model itself to synthesize paired multilingual videos of the same speaker. Specifically, we generate multilingual videos with language switches within a single clip, and then inpaint the face and audio in each half to match the language of the other half. By leveraging the rich generative prior of the audio-visual model, our approach preserves speaker identity and lip synchronization while remaining robust to complex motion and real-world dynamics. We demonstrate that our approach produces high-quality dubbed videos with improved visual fidelity, lip synchronization, and robustness compared to existing dubbing pipelines.
toXiv_bot_toot

Google launches task automation for Gemini on Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S26, enabling it to autonomously navigate apps like Uber and DoorDash (Allison Johnson/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/884210/google-gemini-samsung-s26-pixel-10-uber

Gemini is getting its first agentic capabilities
Google’s AI assistant will be able to hail an Uber for you or put together a grocery order — all on its own.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun;
Nor the furious winter's rages,
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages;
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney sweepers come to dust
https://www.williamshakespeare.net/fear-no-mor…

Army warrant officers will 'bid' against each other for their next bonus (Patty Nieberg/Task & Purpose)
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-warrant-officer-bonus-auction/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260220/p142#a260220p142

Midjourney CEO David Holz says the company's revenue "significantly surpassed" $200M in 2023, and has "gone up" since then, despite its declining web traffic (Jemima McEvoy/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/mi

Midjourney Is Profitable and Chasing Hardware Dreams. But Can It Survive Google?
Over much of the past year, David Holz, the 37-year-old founder of Midjourney, has devoted himself to a single task: reassuring fans of his AI image-making tool that a new, significant update—version 8—would indeed arrive soon. Initially, Holz said it might come at the end of 2025. That date ...

Anthropic starts rolling out Remote Control for Claude Code, letting users control a session begun in the terminal from the Claude mobile app or the web (Claude/@claudeai)
https://x.com/claudeai/status/2026418433911603668

Claude (@claudeai) on X
New in Claude Code: Remote Control. Kick off a task in your terminal and pick it up from your phone while you take a walk or join a meeting. Claude keeps running on your machine, and you can control the session from the Claude app or https://t.co/er6Blrr63e

Hardness and Tractability of T_{h 1}-Free Edge Deletion
Ajinkya Gaikwad, Soumen Maity, Leeja R
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00644 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.00644 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.00644
arXiv:2602.00644v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the parameterized complexity of the T(h 1)-Free Edge Deletion problem. Given a graph G and integers k and h, the task is to delete at most k edges so that every connected component of the resulting graph has size at most h. The problem is NP-complete for every fixed h at least 3, while it is solvable in polynomial time for h at most 2.
Recent work showed strong hardness barriers: the problem is W[1]-hard when parameterized by the solution size together with the size of a feedback edge set, ruling out fixed-parameter tractability for many classical structural parameters. We significantly strengthen these negative results by proving W[1]-hardness when parameterized by the vertex deletion distance to a disjoint union of paths, the vertex deletion distance to a disjoint union of stars, or the twin cover number. These results unify and extend known hardness results for treewidth, pathwidth, and feedback vertex set, and show that several restrictive parameters, including treedepth, cluster vertex deletion number, and modular width, do not yield fixed-parameter tractability when h is unbounded.
On the positive side, we identify parameterizations that restore tractability. We show that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by cluster vertex deletion together with h, and also when parameterized by neighborhood diversity together with h via an integer linear programming formulation. We further present a fixed-parameter tractable bicriteria approximation algorithm parameterized by k. Finally, we show that the problem admits fixed-parameter tractable algorithms on split graphs and interval graphs, and we establish hardness for a directed generalization even on directed acyclic graphs.
toXiv_bot_toot

If a convoy came under attack from Iranian missiles or drones, the escorting warship would have only seconds to respond.
Similar escort and air defence efforts have already been seen in the Red Sea against Houthi attacks, so there is a working model.
The problem is that such operations consume major resources and are extremely costly if they are to be sustained for every transit.
The danger would not come only from the air or the shore.
Iran could also rely on swarms…

The challenges of securing Hormuz as 6 nations issue joint statement - Naval News
The leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Japan and Canada issued a joint statement on the Strait of Hormuz. They expressed their readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait. As things stand today however, such a task appears to be rather difficult.

ARC Prize Foundation unveils ARC-AGI-3, an AI benchmark with simple video-game-like scenarios designed to measure on-the-fly reasoning rather than memory recall (Mark Sullivan/Fast Company)
https://www.fastcompany.com/91515360/arc-prize-foundation-new-ai-benchmark

Exclusive: This new benchmark could expose AI’s biggest weakness
ARC-AGI-3 tests whether models can reason through novel problems, not just recall patterns, a task even top systems still struggle to do.

Ai2 launches MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent available in 4B and 8B parameter sizes, operating via browser screenshots rather than parsing HTML (Sean Michael Kerner/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/data/ai2-releases-molmowe…