Tootfinder

Apple announces a new live translation feature across Messages, FaceTime, and Phone apps, but has not yet said how many languages will be supported (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/09/appl…

Apple introduces live translation across Messages, FaceTime, and Phone at WWDC 25 | TechCrunch
Apple is introducing Live Translation, powered by Apple Intelligence, for Messages, FaceTime and Phone calls. 

I hate this on principle, sure, but after it acquired and then suddenly axed DCist* I can't even care much about fighting for my local affiliate.
𝐎𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐨𝐧 | 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔.𝐒. 𝐠𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐩 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐍𝐏𝐑, 𝐏𝐁𝐒
𝑂𝑛 𝑇ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑠𝑑𝑎𝑦, 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐻𝑜𝑢𝑠𝑒 𝑣𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑐𝑢𝑡 $1.1 𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑝𝑢𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑐 𝑚𝑒𝑑𝑖𝑎, 𝑤ℎ𝑖𝑐ℎ, 𝑖𝑓 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑏𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒, 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑙 ℎ𝑢𝑟𝑡 𝑙𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑙 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑚𝑜𝑠𝑡.

The U.S. government is one step closer to defunding NPR, PBS - Poynter
On Thursday, the House narrowly passed a bill to pull $1.1 billion in funding from NPR, PBS and local public media stations.

Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): Pipeline-Determined Physical Properties of OB Stars
J. M. Bestenlehner, Paul A. Crowther, V. A. Bronner, S. Simon-Diaz, D. J. Lennon, J. Bodensteiner, N. Langer, P. Marchant, H. Sana, F. R. N. Schneider, T. Shenar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00117

Binarity at LOw Metallicity (BLOeM): Pipeline-Determined Physical Properties of OB Stars
We aim to determine the physical properties of OB stars from the multi-epoch VLT/FLAMES BLOeM spectroscopic survey of the Small Magellanic Cloud. We apply a pipeline designed to analyse large spectroscopic samples of OB stars to the co-added, initial 9 epochs of the BLOeM survey, utilising grids of synthetic model spectra computed with the stellar atmosphere code FASTWIND. 69 OB stars are excluded from the analysis owing to disk emission or significant contamination by secondaries in SB2 binari…

TalkingMachines: Real-Time Audio-Driven FaceTime-Style Video via Autoregressive Diffusion Models
Chetwin Low, Weimin Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03099 …

TalkingMachines: Real-Time Audio-Driven FaceTime-Style Video via Autoregressive Diffusion Models
In this paper, we present TalkingMachines -- an efficient framework that transforms pretrained video generation models into real-time, audio-driven character animators. TalkingMachines enables natural conversational experiences by integrating an audio large language model (LLM) with our video generation foundation model. Our primary contributions include: (1) We adapt a pretrained SOTA image-to-video DiT into an audio-driven avatar generation model of 18 billion parameters; (2) We enable infini…