Tootfinder

Survey: US employees who use AI at work at least a few times per year rises from 21% in 2023 to 40% in 2025, and 19% report frequently using AI, up from 11% (Ryan Pendell/Gallup)
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/691643/work-nearly-doubled-two-years.aspx

AI Use at Work Has Nearly Doubled in Two Years
White-collar workers and leaders are the primary users. Leaders can further drive AI adoption by clearly communicating why and how to use it.

Two Higgs Doublet Solutions to the Strong CP Problem
Quentin Bonnefoy, Lawrence J. Hall, Claudio Andrea Manzari, Bea Noether
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13853

Two Higgs Doublet Solutions to the Strong CP Problem
We solve the strong CP problem in a broad class of two Higgs doublet theories that will be probed at the Large Hadron Collider and at future colliders.These theories feature CP and Abelian flavor symmetries, both broken softly in the scalar potential, that yield realistic quark masses and mixings. The flavor symmetry charges are chosen so that $\barθ=0$ at tree level for all values of the Yukawa and quartic couplings of the theory. We prove that in all such theories the 1-loop contribution to …

Impact of a Deployed LLM Survey Creation Tool through the IS Success Model
Peng Jiang, Vinicius Cezar Monteiro de Lira, Antonio Maiorino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14809

Impact of a Deployed LLM Survey Creation Tool through the IS Success Model
Surveys are a cornerstone of Information Systems (IS) research, yet creating high-quality surveys remains labor-intensive, requiring both domain expertise and methodological rigor. With the evolution of large language models (LLMs), new opportunities emerge to automate survey generation. This paper presents the real-world deployment of an LLM-powered system designed to accelerate data collection while maintaining survey quality. Deploying such systems in production introduces real-world complex…

Russian double-tap attack injures 5, including emergency workers, in Nikopol: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/17/russian-doubletap-attack-injures-including.html

Appeals court lets Trump keep control National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles during protests (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-protests-national-guard-lawsuit-ae2433fca9a2834634efefc9a545745b
http://www.memeorandum.com/250619/p128#a250619p128

A succession of opposition politicians, including Alex Padilla, a US senator, are handcuffed and arrested by heavy-handed law enforcement for little more than questioning authority or voicing dissent.
A judge is arrested in her own courthouse and charged with helping a defendant evade arrest.
Masked snatch squads arrest and spirit people away in public in what seem to be consciously intimidating scenes.
The president deploys the military on a dubious legal premise to confro…

My university just released the final report of its AI Task Force. I haven't read it yet (though I will!), but based solely on the task force membership, which didn't include a single humanist, I'm not expecting to like it.
Maybe I'm being unfair?
https://www.

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
An addendum to this: I'm someone who would accurately be called "anti-AI" in the modern age, yet I'm also an "AI researcher" in some ways (have only dabbled in neutral nets).
I don't like:
- AI systems that are the product of labor abuses towards the data workers who curate their training corpora.
- AI systems that use inordinate amounts of water and energy during an intensifying climate catastrophe.
- AI systems that are fundamentally untrustworthy and which reinforce and amplify human biases, *especially* when those systems are exposed in a way that invites harms.
- AI systems which are designed to "save" my attention or brain bandwidth but such my doing so cripple my understating of the things I might use them for when I fact that understanding was the thing I was supposed to be using my time to gain, and where the later lack of such understanding will be costly to me.
- AI systems that are designed by and whose hype fattens the purse of people who materially support genocide and the construction of concentration campus (a.k.a. fascists).
In other words, I do not like and except in very extenuating circumstances I will not use ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, etc.
On the other hand, I do like:
- AI research as an endeavor to discover new technologies.
- Generative AI as a research topic using a spectrum of different methods.
- Speculating about non-human intelligences, including artificial ones, and including how to behave ethically towards them.
- Large language models as a specific technique, and autoencoders and other neural networks, assuming they're used responsibly in terms of both resource costs & presentation to end users.
I write this because I think some people (especially folks without CS backgrounds) may feel that opposing AI for all the harms it's causing runs the risk of opposing technological innovation more broadly, and/or may feel there's a risk that they will be "left behind" as everyone else embraces the hype and these technologies inevitability become ubiquitous and essential (I know I feel this way sometimes). Just know that is entirely possible and logically consistent to both oppose many forms of modern AI while also embracing and even being optimistic about AI research, and that while LLMs are currently all the rage, they're not the endpoint of what AI will look like in the future, and their downsides are not inherent in AI development.

Wagner mercenary who trained Russian boxing champion, fought in Ukraine, was killed in Mali, intelligence source says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/18/wagner-mercenary-who-trained-russian.html

Key to whether Trump can tilt America decisively into authoritarianism will be his efforts to assert control over the armed forces.
“Trump’s ramping up of the effort to politicize the military can still go in multiple directions,” Levitsky said.
“It could be really ugly and bad, because the only way that you can get from where we are to real authoritarianism like Nicaragua or Venezuela or Russia is if Trump has the military and security forces on his side,
and he’s taken s…