Tootfinder

Russia intensifies efforts to encircle key Ukrainian cities of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/16/russia-intensifies-efforts-to-encircle.html

Sources: Meta plans its fourth AI restructuring in six months, dividing Superintelligence Labs into TBD Lab, a product team, an infrastructure team, and FAIR (Kalley Huang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-plans-fourth…

Meta Plans Fourth Restructuring of AI Efforts in Six Months
Meta Platforms is planning the fourth restructuring of its artificial intelligence efforts in six months, according to three people familiar with the matter. Meta’s new AI organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, is expected to be divided into four groups: a new lab that has been going by TBD ...

⛩️ Efforts To Reconstruct Edo Castle Tower Keep Enter 18th Year
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/art_and_culture/japanese-culture/efforts-to-reconstruct-edo-castle-tower-keep-enter-18th-year/

The Edo Castle Reconstruction Project Enters 18th Year
Efforts to reconstruct the once magnificent Edo Castle have been met with numerous obstacles, pushing the project into it's18th year.

Everyday Hiker
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods

Less Pain, More Gain - Practising the Piano
#piano #practice

Less Pain, More Gain - Practising the Piano
Ryan Morison, shares his journey from injury caused by a traditional, finger-centric piano technique to a more natural, effortless way of playing.  

DiaryPlay: AI-Assisted Authoring of Interactive Vignettes for Everyday Storytelling
Jiangnan Xu, Haeseul Cha, Gosu Choi, Gyu-cheol Lee, Yeo-Jin Yoon, Zucheul Lee, Konstantinos Papangelis, Dae Hyun Kim, Juho Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11628

DiaryPlay: AI-Assisted Authoring of Interactive Vignettes for Everyday Storytelling
An interactive vignette is a popular and immersive visual storytelling approach that invites viewers to role-play a character and influences the narrative in an interactive environment. However, it has not been widely used by everyday storytellers yet due to authoring complexity, which conflicts with the immediacy of everyday storytelling. We introduce DiaryPlay, an AI-assisted authoring system for interactive vignette creation in everyday storytelling. It takes a natural language story as inpu…

To add a single example here (feel free to chime in with your own):
Problem: editing code is sometimes tedious because external APIs require boilerplate.
Solutions:
- Use LLM-generated code. Downsides: energy use, code theft, potential for legal liability, makes mistakes, etc. Upsides: popular among some peers, seems easy to use.
- Pick a better library (not always possible).
- Build internal functions to centralize boilerplate code, then use those (benefits: you get a better understanding of the external API, and a more-unit-testable internal code surface; probably less amortized effort).
- Develop a non-LLM system that actually reasons about code at something like the formal semantics level and suggests boilerplate fill-ins based on rules, while foregrounding which rules it's applying so you can see the logic behind the suggestions (needs research).
Obviously LLM use in coding goes beyond this single issue, but there are similar analyses for each potential use of LLMs in coding. I'm all cases there are:
1. Existing practical solutions that require more effort (or in many cases just seem to but are less-effort when amortized).
2. Near-term researchable solutions that directly address the problem and which would be much more desirable in the long term.
Thus in addition to disastrous LLM effects on the climate, on data laborers, and on the digital commons, they tend to suck us into cheap-seeming but ultimately costly design practices while also crowding out better long-term solutions. Next time someone suggests how useful LLMs are for some task, try asking yourself (or them) what an ideal solution for that task would look like, and whether LLM use moves us closer to or father from a world in which that solution exists.

Apple CarPlay Ultra hands-on: currently exclusive to Aston Martin, enhances center console integration, works smoothly with driver assist systems, and more (Michael Teo Van Runkle/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/07/everything-w…

Everything we learned from a week with Apple CarPlay Ultra
CarPlay Ultra takes over the main instrument display as well as the infotainment.

No ceasefire, possible land swaps, vague security guarantees: Everything we know following Trump’s meeting with Putin: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/16/no-ceasefire-possible-land-swaps.html

'Borders must not be changed by force' — European leaders back Trump's peace effort but say Ukraine must decide its territory: https://benborges.xyz/2025/08/16/borders-must-not-be-changed.html