Tootfinder

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #90TEEN
Fazerdaze:
🎵 Cherry Pie
#Fazerdaze
https://fazerdaze.bandcamp.com/track/cherry-pie
https://open.spotify.com/track/20bn8UrHSGODum7utPZhgB

Researcher brutecat finds a vulnerability that revealed the phone number linked to any Google account via brute forcing phone numbers; Google fixed the issue (Joseph Cox/404 Media)
https://www.404media.co/a-researcher-figur

A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account
Phone numbers are a goldmine for SIM swappers. A researcher found how to get this precious piece of information from any Google account.

My favourite way to trick myself into thinking that I'm doing work is to ask questions related to my task in Slack channels.
In my defense - there is currently very limited brain space because a certain funder decided to drop a figurative bomb on our institute and everything revolves around this now...

A Researcher Figured Out How to Reveal Any Phone Number Linked to a Google Account https://www.404media.co/a-researcher-figured-out-how-to-reveal-any-phone-number-linked-to-a-google-account/

In principle, I don't remove old contacts from my phone. I've figured out, if one of them ever calls me, I'd know who is calling.
Because surely some random name will tell me a lot, 15 years later. In some cases, I've even literally added a question mark already.

FedRAG: A Framework for Fine-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Val Andrei Fajardo, David B. Emerson, Amandeep Singh, Veronica Chatrath, Marcelo Lotif, Ravi Theja, Alex Cheung, Izuki Matsubi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09200

FedRAG: A Framework for Fine-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems have been shown to be effective in addressing many of the drawbacks of relying solely on the parametric memory of large language models. Recent work has demonstrated that RAG systems can be improved via fine-tuning of their retriever and generator models. In this work, we introduce FedRAG, a framework for fine-tuning RAG systems across centralized and federated architectures. FedRAG supports state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods, offering a simple and…

All three nodes are installed. The "server room" is an absolute mess, but figured I'd snap a picture of the back of the minirack. I'll be cleaning up tomorrow, but for now: we are 100% back online here. Migrations work, iSCSI works...well, everything works. Very happy with how this has turned out thus far.
#minirack

Years ago, I moved to a place where I didn't speak the language. My initial strategy for dealing with interactions I didn't understand was to simply say "no." I figured this was safe - at least I wouldn't agree to something I didn't want. One day, as I was leaving my apartment with a friend, the guy across the hall asked me a question. "No," I said. He looked like I'd spit in his face then retreated to his apartment. My friend, dumbfounded, asked &quot…

Tug-of-war between idiom's figurative and literal meanings in LLMs
Soyoung Oh, Xinting Huang, Mathis Pink, Michael Hahn, Vera Demberg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01723

Tug-of-war between idiom's figurative and literal meanings in LLMs
Idioms present a unique challenge for language models due to their non-compositional figurative meanings, which often strongly diverge from the idiom's literal interpretation. This duality requires a model to learn representing and deciding between the two meanings to interpret an idiom in a figurative sense, or literally. In this paper, we employ tools from mechanistic interpretability to trace how a large pretrained causal transformer (LLama3.2-1B-base) deals with this ambiguity. We localize …

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
Fazerdaze:
🎵 Dancing Years
#Fazerdaze
https://fazerdaze.bandcamp.com/track/dancing-years
https://open.spotify.com/track/5SodlvQvYlTyvvJCYnskkr