Tootfinder

Is there any evidence that a brain implant for restoring vision will give more functional vision than a noninvasive sensory substitution device?
Grok's answer: https://x.com/i/grok/share/qqXguBGin6FDIab7ra6pwdtm2 "No, there is no evidence"
ChatGPT's an…

Is there any evidence that a brain implant for restoring vision will give more functional vision than a noninvasive sensory substitution device? Don't speculate. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmrvukzbS44SMVxMLRpd-_iTpy_Cj5liB
No, there is no evidence from current studies or comparisons that brain implants for vision restoration provide more functional vision than noninvasive sensory substitution devices. Available direct comparisons, such as those examining retinal or cortical implants (e.g., Argus II) against devices like The vOICe, indicate the opposite: noninvasive options demonstrate broader functional outcomes in tasks like object recognition, grasping, and navigation, with better resolution, field of view, and…

If I reply to a migrated account it will never reply to me and I might not ever notice it's migrated unless I view the profile on the source server.
Here is a mastodon suggestion issue with a few ideas to make it more clear the account has migrated.
If you have ideas add them to the issue as a comment!
https://

First EM simulations on the switch logic board after sorting out some licensing issues with the new Sonnet version.
V19 is a lot faster than v18, it doubles the thread cap from 8 to 16 and also replaces the legacy SSE based matrix solver with an AVX-based version (geee, i wonder where they might have got that from...).
First test is the BGA launch for LC0_PHY0_LANE1_TX, a 5 Gbps QSGMII link but also representative of some of the 25G SERDES.
Return loss is better than -13 dB…

Q1’s –0.5% growth is already a bad look. But Apollo’s Torsten SlŸk points out that data-center construction alone added about a full percentage point. Remove it, and you’re staring at –1.5%.
Q2 looks so much healthier at 3.0%, or you would think so. Pantheon Macroeconomics sums up the first half of 2025 with some more sobriety: AI alone contributed about half a percentage point of GDP. Without it, the U.S. would be bumbling along at 1% growth. Still better than minus, but thin grass all the same.
One more stat for the better view: since 2019, investment in AI-sensitive sectors is up 53%, while everywhere else is basically flat – 0.3%.
https://www.turingpost.com/p/fod114?_bhlid=f437d028caabcb66cc36e677728d12aea2504a71

We hoofed it up Mill Mountain before the heat ~really~ set in. The humidity did not wait, unfortunately, but we enjoyed it all the same.
We are now decamped in a coffee shop and pondering lunch options. I think we’re off to a bistro and bakery we’ve heard great things about. Their Better Than Sex cake is reputed to be true to its name.

Nikki Haley’s campaign manager warned influential donors Tuesday that the GOP would lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives
if Donald Trump is the party’s presidential nominee,
leaning into concerns about down-ballot races
as some anti-Trump Republicans view the fight over Congress as a better investment than the presidential race.

Haley camp seeks to convince top donors that Trump would cost GOP the House
The move marked the latest effort by a campaign many Republicans have written off to hit back against the overwhelming GOP favorite.

Beyond One Shot, Beyond One Perspective: Cross-View and Long-Horizon Distillation for Better LiDAR Representations
Xiang Xu, Lingdong Kong, Song Wang, Chuanwei Zhou, Qingshan Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05260

Beyond One Shot, Beyond One Perspective: Cross-View and Long-Horizon Distillation for Better LiDAR Representations
LiDAR representation learning aims to extract rich structural and semantic information from large-scale, readily available datasets, reducing reliance on costly human annotations. However, existing LiDAR representation strategies often overlook the inherent spatiotemporal cues in LiDAR sequences, limiting their effectiveness. In this work, we propose LiMA, a novel long-term image-to-LiDAR Memory Aggregation framework that explicitly captures longer range temporal correlations to enhance LiDAR r…

Outflowing shocked gas dominates the NIR H$_2$ emission from the dual AGN NGC6240
J. Carlsen, C. Cicone, B. Hagedorn, K. Rubinur, P. Andreani, K. Dasyra, P. Severgnini, C. Vignali, R. Morganti, T. Oosterloo, A. Lasrado, E. Lopez-Rodriguez, S. Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17584

Outflowing shocked gas dominates the NIR H$_2$ emission from the dual AGN NGC6240
[Abridged] We present a multi-line study of the kinematics of the molecular and ionised gas phases in the central 2 kpc of NGC6240, based on JWST/NIRSpec and ALMA observations. We devised a new spectral-line fitting approach to de-blend rotating and non-rotating gas components, which is better tailored to the extreme feedback mechanisms at work in NGC6240. We find that ~65% of the Pa$α$, H$_2$, and [FeII] line fluxes within the NIRSpec field of view arise from gas components that are kinematic…

One of the issues in the discussion about (gen)AI is the level of anthropomorphizing (terrible word, i have to look it up everytime). AI is not "intelligent" as humans are. It is something different. In some aspects it is better then humans in other (often relatively simple things) incredibly worse. Also we draw wrong conclusions, being able to win a math olympiad is impressive but is not necessarily a sign of intelligence. I view AI as very capable world changing technology. That&…

Scholastic status of congenitally blind children following sight surgery https://internationalsped.com/ijse/article/view/386 "a compelling case for more rigorous assessments and better educational interventions for visually impaired/sight restored children"

Anti-Aliased 2D Gaussian Splatting
Mae Younes, Adnane Boukhayma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11252 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.11252

Anti-Aliased 2D Gaussian Splatting
2D Gaussian Splatting (2DGS) has recently emerged as a promising method for novel view synthesis and surface reconstruction, offering better view-consistency and geometric accuracy than volumetric 3DGS. However, 2DGS suffers from severe aliasing artifacts when rendering at different sampling rates than those used during training, limiting its practical applications in scenarios requiring camera zoom or varying fields of view. We identify that these artifacts stem from two key limitations: the l…

This isn't meant dismissively toward those who use such tools for rhythmic manipulation - there are no rules, and you probably do it better than me - but every single "beat mangler" or "glitch" plugin I've ever used somehow sounds terrible.
In all these years, no releases have changed that view, and doing it by hand always seems preferable. (Obviously, I'm not talking about inputting or tools we use/build that generate note values; this is strictly about…

Bradley's understanding of this is outstanding. We can discount the goal, perhaps, but he was so very good in both directions. He was constantly showing up in places that Salah left for him and his chemistry w/ Mo & Szoboszlai is terrific. Frimpong;s signing asked questions about who might be the starter. In my view, it's Bradley. Frimpong was good. He's certainly fast, but he didn't get to show as much offensively and Bradley is a better defender. I think it's depth/…

John Oliver knows better:
#comedy

The Case against Scale: Empirical Evidence of Underperformance in Large Secondary Funds
Jitesh Gurav
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12436 https://

The Case against Scale: Empirical Evidence of Underperformance in Large Secondary Funds
The paper analyses the increasing popularity of large funds in the secondary private equity market, which are pegged on the perceived larger scale advantages of operational efficiency and fewer manager relationships (Reuter & Zitzewitz, 2021). However, it has been proved empirically that smaller funds perform better than the big ones in terms of their internal rates of return (IRRs). This work questions this authoritative view, providing evidence of outperformance of smaller funds relative to t…

Radiance Fields in XR: A Survey on How Radiance Fields are Envisioned and Addressed for XR Research
Ke Li, Mana Masuda, Susanne Schmidt, Shohei Mori
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04326

Radiance Fields in XR: A Survey on How Radiance Fields are Envisioned and Addressed for XR Research
The development of radiance fields (RF), such as 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), has revolutionized interactive photorealistic view synthesis and presents enormous opportunities for XR research and applications. However, despite the exponential growth of RF research, RF-related contributions to the XR community remain sparse. To better understand this research gap, we performed a systematic survey of current RF literature to analyze (i) how RF is envisioned for X…