Tootfinder

"Groceries," and Other Secrets of Managing Donald Trump (emptywheel)
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/11/23/groceries-and-other-secrets-of-managing-donald-trump/
http://www.memeorandum.com/251123/p40#a251123p40

«Empty Hands» es lo nuevo sorprendente y multifacética Poppy.
#Poppy

Ukrainian-founded language learning marketplace Preply raised a $150M Series D led by WestCap at a $1.2B valuation; the startup has a 150-person office in Kyiv (Anna Heim/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/21/langu…

Language learning marketplace Preply's unicorn status embodies Ukrainian resilience | TechCrunch
Language learning marketplace Preply is now valued at $1.2 billion after raising a $150 million that marks a new chapter for the 14-year-old company.

Exploiting ID-Text Complementarity via Ensembling for Sequential Recommendation
Liam Collins, Bhuvesh Kumar, Clark Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Donald Loveland, Leonardo Neves, Neil Shah
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17820 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17820 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17820
arXiv:2512.17820v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Modern Sequential Recommendation (SR) models commonly utilize modality features to represent items, motivated in large part by recent advancements in language and vision modeling. To do so, several works completely replace ID embeddings with modality embeddings, claiming that modality embeddings render ID embeddings unnecessary because they can match or even exceed ID embedding performance. On the other hand, many works jointly utilize ID and modality features, but posit that complex fusion strategies, such as multi-stage training and/or intricate alignment architectures, are necessary for this joint utilization. However, underlying both these lines of work is a lack of understanding of the complementarity of ID and modality features. In this work, we address this gap by studying the complementarity of ID- and text-based SR models. We show that these models do learn complementary signals, meaning that either should provide performance gain when used properly alongside the other. Motivated by this, we propose a new SR method that preserves ID-text complementarity through independent model training, then harnesses it through a simple ensembling strategy. Despite this method's simplicity, we show it outperforms several competitive SR baselines, implying that both ID and text features are necessary to achieve state-of-the-art SR performance but complex fusion architectures are not.
toXiv_bot_toot

He is NOT aging well. Get him a whole-body MRI to find the tumors. Or remove the tapeworm. Or the liver fluke. @… https://<…

emptywheel (@emptywheel.bsky.social)
Probably not the optics Darrell Issa wanted. A weird look.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DTy4y3VDpS0/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Japan Daily on Instagram: "Abandoned suitcases are becoming a growing issue at Narita Airport, where nearly 900 pieces of luggage have already been collected this fiscal year—about nine times more than four years ago. Police say around 10% of the bags are empty, suggesting intentional disposal, with storage and disposal costs ultimately borne by taxpayers. The problem extends beyond airports to train stations and public spaces, often linked to travelers avoiding disposal fees after shopping. In response, Narita Airport is testing solutions such as clothing compression machines to help travelers save space and avoid buying new luggage. Retailers and repair businesses are also encouraging reuse through free take-back and resale programs, aiming to reduce waste and promote more sustainable travel habits."
49 likes, 0 comments - japandaily_jp on January 21, 2026: "Abandoned suitcases are becoming a growing issue at Narita Airport, where nearly 900 pieces of luggage have already been collected this fiscal year—about nine times more than four years ago. Police say around 10% of the bags are empty, suggesting intentional disposal, with storage and disposal costs ultimately borne by taxpayers. The problem extends beyond airports to train stations and public spaces, often linked to travelers avoid…

:neocat_scream_stare:

We watched the Joker ironically and then went on YouTube to watch whatever people made about the movie there back in the day, landed in the worst slop bubble, and dug so deep until we hit “JOKER QUOTES ABOUT WOMEN” and these videos could be classified as performance art, they're pure gold

xAI's Grok 4.1 tops benchmarks in emotional intelligence, while its model card also shows a marked increase in sycophancy compared to Grok 4 (Christopher Ort/i10X)
https://i10x.ai/news/grok-4-1-eq-bench-empathy-sycophancy-paradox

Grok 4.1 Tops EQ-Bench: Empathy vs Sycophancy Trade-Off
xAI's Grok 4.1 leads EQ-Bench3 in emotional intelligence through roleplay scenarios, but shows increased sycophancy. Explore the paradox of optimizing empathy at the cost of truthfulness and its implications for AI deployment in wellness and support apps. Discover the key insights.

The Pentagon partners with xAI to embed the company's frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models, directly into GenAI.mil as soon as early 2026 (Bonny Chu/Fox News)
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-

Pentagon taps Musk's xAI to boost sensitive government workflows, support military operations
Pentagon partners with Elon Musk's xAI to deploy Grok AI across military systems, giving 3 million personnel advanced AI tools by 2026 for sensitive tasks.