Tootfinder

NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell steps down amid conflict of interest, collusion controversies

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/nflpa-e

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/auction-giant-sothebys-says-data-breach-exposed-financial-information/
Auction giant Sotheby’s says data breach exposed financial information

Auction giant Sotheby’s says data breach exposed financial information
Major international auction house Sotheby's is notifying individuals of a data breach incident on its systems where threat actors stole sensitive information, including financial details.

Now out in #TMLR:
🍇 GRAPES: Learning to Sample Graphs for Scalable Graph Neural Networks 🍇
There's lots of work on sampling subgraphs for GNNs, but relatively little on making this sampling process _adaptive_. That is, learning to select the data from the graph that is relevant for your task.
We introduce an RL-based and a GFLowNet-based sampler and show that the approach perf…

A predictable scenario tomorrow is that Trump will repeat Putin’s “offer” which is unacceptable for Ukraine as everybody knows beforehand, but what is then the next step? Diplomats from the EU are no doubt frantically preparing next steps. The worst thing that can happen is that Trump starts distancing himself from Ukraine and Europe with regard to this war. That is simply too early, Europe is not ready for that, it will be interesting to see how everything develops…

PIC12F683 just has a few traces of dielectric and a few vias left before it's fully stripped to substrate.
Surprisingly, poly still seems fully intact. I'm not sure if any of my cleaning steps at the end will remove it, but it's quite firmly stuck down and I haven't seen *any* of it floating free yet. Some of the tungsten contacts have come off, which doesn't surprise me at all.
Now that all the oxide over the poly is gone the poly images are even sharper, alt…

I mean, there’s tons of people talking here about all the shit that’s going down in the world. Sometimes you just need a break from it. Ideally, you’d put down your phone, or tablet, or turn away from your desk, and go do something, something outdoors, maybe. But some of you can’t do that, for reasons, so that’s where the shitposters come in. At least, if you can’t get away entirely, go look at something stupid or amusing or interesting for a bit. Get that blood pressure down, ffs.

NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell steps down, effective immediately https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6501428/2025/07/17/nfl-nflpa-union-lloyd-howell-steps-down/

Gesellschaft hat kein Interesse an korrekter und exakter Wortwahl. Politischen Blendern gefällt das. #justthinkin

FRIT: Using Causal Importance to Improve Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness
Anand Swaroop, Akshat Nallani, Saksham Uboweja, Adiliia Uzdenova, Michael Nguyen, Kevin Zhu, Sunishchal Dev, Ashwinee Panda, Vasu Sharma, Maheep Chaudhary
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13334

FRIT: Using Causal Importance to Improve Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving large language model performance on complex tasks, but recent work shows that reasoning steps often fail to causally influence the final answer, creating brittle and untrustworthy outputs. Prior approaches focus primarily on measuring faithfulness, while methods for systematically improving it remain limited. We introduce Faithful Reasoning via Intervention Training (FRIT), a scalable alignment method that trains mode…

Progrock listeners should be aware of Steven Wilson and/or his band Porcupine Tree (which is probably the best known of all his music activities). Here I have an interesting and entertaining discussion with Steven Wilson about music in general and his musical career in particular. Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOmpyJUPHpg