Tootfinder

Allusionist 218: Banned Books #podcast

Alexander Smirnov, the ex–FBI informant who admitted to lying about the Biden-Burisma connection, has been released from prison just months into his six-year prison sentence.
In a plea deal in December 2024, Smirnov admitted to completely fabricating the conspiracy that became central to a Republican effort to impeach then-President Joe Biden.
Days later, the Russian asset pleaded guilty to four felony charges, including one count of obstruction, and was sentenced to six years in …

FBI Informant Who Lied About the Bidens Covertly Released From Jail
Alexander Smirnov pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was sentenced to six years in jail.

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Röyksopp feat. Alison Goldfrapp:
🎵 Impossible (Radio Edit)
#NowPlaying #Röyksopp #AlisonGoldfrapp
https://matthewsona.bandcamp.com/track/r-yksopp-alison-goldfrapp-impossible-matthew-sona-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/0fp270eqzHNzePJkEw8zBg

Getting In Contract with Large Language Models -- An Agency Theory Perspective On Large Language Model Alignment
Sascha Kaltenpoth, Oliver M\"uller
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07642

Getting In Contract with Large Language Models -- An Agency Theory Perspective On Large Language Model Alignment
Adopting Large language models (LLMs) in organizations potentially revolutionizes our lives and work. However, they can generate off-topic, discriminating, or harmful content. This AI alignment problem often stems from misspecifications during the LLM adoption, unnoticed by the principal due to the LLM's black-box nature. While various research disciplines investigated AI alignment, they neither address the information asymmetries between organizational adopters and black-box LLM agents nor con…

PIKA: Expert-Level Synthetic Datasets for Post-Training Alignment from Scratch
Shangjian Yin, Shining Liang, Wenbiao Ding, Yuli Qian, Zhouxing Shi, Hongzhi Li, Yutao Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06670

PIKA: Expert-Level Synthetic Datasets for Post-Training Alignment from Scratch
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become a cornerstone for aligning large language models (LLMs). However, its effectiveness depends on high-quality instruction data. Most existing alignment datasets are either private or require costly human annotation, which limits reproducibility and scalability. Even with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), concerns about data quality remain. Moreover, it is unclear how much data is actually required to fine-tune a base mode…

A Minrank-based Encryption Scheme \`a la Alekhnovich-Regev
Thomas Debris-Alazard, Philippe Gaborit, Romaric Neveu, Olivier Ruatta
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07584 https://

A Minrank-based Encryption Scheme à la Alekhnovich-Regev
Introduced in 2003 and 2005, Alekhnovich and Regev' schemes were the first public-key encryptions whose security is only based on the average hardness of decoding random linear codes and LWE, without other security assumptions. Such security guarantees made them very popular, being at the origin of the now standardized HQC or Kyber. We present an adaptation of Alekhnovich and Regev' encryption scheme whose security is only based on the hardness of a slight variation of MinRank, the so-called …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #DriveTime
Alison Goldfrapp:
🎵 Hey Hi Hello
#AlisonGoldfrapp
https://open.spotify.com/track/6ExEV08wGlV5bLqtyRAsdJ

Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models
Heeji Yoon, Jaewoo Jung, Junwan Kim, Hyungyu Choi, Heeseong Shin, Sangbeom Lim, Honggyu An, Chaehyun Kim, Jisang Han, Donghyun Kim, Chanho Eom, Sunghwan Hong, Seungryong Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07979

Visual Representation Alignment for Multimodal Large Language Models
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) trained with visual instruction tuning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, yet they remain limited in vision-centric tasks such as object counting or spatial reasoning. We attribute this gap to the prevailing text-only supervision paradigm, which provides only indirect guidance for the visual pathway and often leads MLLMs to discard fine-grained visual details during training. In this paper, we present VIsual Representation ALignment (…

🇺🇦 Auf radioeins läuft...
Falco:
🎵 Der Kommissar (Rap' that)
#NowPlaying #Falco
https://alexny.bandcamp.com/track/falco-der-kommissar-alexny-edit
https://open.spotify.com/track/3TBRJsLCcwroEkA3tD4u2N

MAGA media
is flexing its ability to
shape the debate over antifa and violent crime in American cities,
-- empowered by allies in the White House
hungry for evidence of left-wing terrorism.
The Trump administration is using clips of violent street clashes
— paired with testimony from MAGA-aligned reporters on the ground
— to falsely depict Democratic-led cities as engulfed in chaos.

MAGA media wages asymmetric warfare on antifa
MAGA-aligned journalists frame their coverage as exposing the "truth" mainstream outlets ignore.