Tootfinder

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Urban Spots 🟤
在路上 - 去西安/ 城市的点 🟤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Fujifilm Neopan F, expired 1993
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

An excellent read on how Google is killing the Open Web through attacks on XML and other technical standards.
https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/

I wish that the flooding/drought situation could be communicated in a way similar to the UKHSA dashboard.
Defra-adjacent stuff tends to have either light information, or a level of detail that's too much for non-professionals.
I just want to see a map with regions coloured to show they're having problems, and maybe year-long time-series graphs that simply convey when a region has too much, or too little, water.

Water situation reports for England
Monthly water situation reports and weekly rainfall and river flow reports.

Advancing Conversational AI with Shona Slang: A Dataset and Hybrid Model for Digital Inclusion
Happymore Masoka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14249 https://ar…

Advancing Conversational AI with Shona Slang: A Dataset and Hybrid Model for Digital Inclusion
African languages remain underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP), with most corpora limited to formal registers that fail to capture the vibrancy of everyday communication. This work addresses this gap for Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe and Zambia, by introducing a novel Shona--English slang dataset curated from anonymized social media conversations. The dataset is annotated for intent, sentiment, dialogue acts, code-mixing, and tone, and is publicly available at https…

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI

They’re not putting forward some thoughtful but controversial theory of whatever. They’re not saying things that Deserve Respect Even If We Disagree. This isn’t that kind of communication. They’re fantasizing about enslavement and gas chambers. There’s nothing for society to gain here from an Honest and Open Exchange of Views Followed by Thoughtful Reflection.

Moody Urbanity - Up Up ⏏️
情绪化城市 - 上面上面 ⏏️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️ Kentmere Pan 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

HARMONIC: A Content-Centric Cognitive Robotic Architecture
Sanjay Oruganti, Sergei Nirenburg, Marjorie McShane, Jesse English, Michael K. Roberts, Christian Arndt, Carlos Gonzalez, Mingyo Seo, Luis Sentis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13279

HARMONIC: A Content-Centric Cognitive Robotic Architecture
This paper introduces HARMONIC, a cognitive-robotic architecture designed for robots in human-robotic teams. HARMONIC supports semantic perception interpretation, human-like decision-making, and intentional language communication. It addresses the issues of safety and quality of results; aims to solve problems of data scarcity, explainability, and safety; and promotes transparency and trust. Two proof-of-concept HARMONIC-based robotic systems are demonstrated, each implemented in both a high-fi…

Breaking Language Barriers: Equitable Performance in Multilingual Language Models
Tanay Nagar, Grigorii Khvatskii, Anna Sokol, Nitesh V. Chawla
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12662 …

Breaking Language Barriers: Equitable Performance in Multilingual Language Models
Cutting-edge LLMs have emerged as powerful tools for multilingual communication and understanding. However, LLMs perform worse in Common Sense Reasoning (CSR) tasks when prompted in low-resource languages (LRLs) like Hindi or Swahili compared to high-resource languages (HRLs) like English. Equalizing this inconsistent access to quality LLM outputs is crucial to ensure fairness for speakers of LRLs and across diverse linguistic communities. In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge this ga…