Tootfinder

John Searle, known for "the Chinese Room" thought experiment on AI consciousness, died on Sept. 16 at 93; his UCB tenure ended over alleged sexual harassment (Alex Traub/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/12/books/john-searle-dead.html

John Searle, Philosopher Who Wrestled With A.I., Dies at 93
His blunt debating and imaginative theorizing about artificial intelligence and the human mind made him a leading scholar. But sexual-harassment allegations ended his career.

OdysseyBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Complex Office Application Workflows
Weixuan Wang, Dongge Han, Daniel Madrigal Diaz, Jin Xu, Victor R\"uhle, Saravan Rajmohan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09124

OdysseyBench: Evaluating LLM Agents on Long-Horizon Complex Office Application Workflows
Autonomous agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications requiring complex, long-horizon workflows. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on atomic tasks that are self-contained and independent, failing to capture the long-term contextual dependencies and multi-interaction coordination required in realistic scenarios. To address this gap, we introduce OdysseyBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLM agents on long-horizo…

ODYSSEY: Open-World Quadrupeds Exploration and Manipulation for Long-Horizon Tasks
Kaijun Wang, Liqin Lu, Mingyu Liu, Jianuo Jiang, Zeju Li, Bolin Zhang, Wancai Zheng, Xinyi Yu, Hao Chen, Chunhua Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08240

ODYSSEY: Open-World Quadrupeds Exploration and Manipulation for Long-Horizon Tasks
Language-guided long-horizon mobile manipulation has long been a grand challenge in embodied semantic reasoning, generalizable manipulation, and adaptive locomotion. Three fundamental limitations hinder progress: First, although large language models have improved spatial reasoning and task planning through semantic priors, existing implementations remain confined to tabletop scenarios, failing to address the constrained perception and limited actuation ranges of mobile platforms. Second, curre…

A fun collection of random tools by an indie web developer:
#software #tools

Pete Hegseth, the US defense secretary, abruptly fired Jon Harrison, the navy chief of staff on Friday,
removing an aide who had been key to the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the Pentagon.
Harrison, who was appointed in January, had been key to broad changes made to the navy’s policy and budgeting offices.
Together with John Phelan, a Trump mega-donor who was confirmed as navy secretary in March,
Harrison had reportedly sought to limit the influence of th…

Mapping the Milky Way with Gaia Bp/Rp spectra II: The inner stellar halo traced by a large sample of blue horizontal branch stars
Wenbo Wu, Xianhao Ye, C. Allende Prieto, Yuqin Chen, Xiang-Xiang Xue, Gang Zhao, Jingkun Zhao, David S. Aguado, Jonay I. Gonz\'alez Hern\'andez, Rafael Rebolo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08784

Mapping the Milky Way with Gaia Bp/Rp spectra II: The inner stellar halo traced by a large sample of blue horizontal branch stars
We selected BHB stars based on synthetic photometry and stellar atmosphere parameters inferred from Gaia Bp/Rp spectra. We generated the synthetic SDSS broad-band $ugr$ and Pristine narrow-band CaHK magnitudes from Gaia Bp/Rp data. A photometric selection of BHB candidates was made in the $(u-g, g-r)$ and $(u-\mathrm{CaHK},g-r)$ color-color spaces. A spectroscopic selection in $T_\mathrm{eff}-\log g$ space was applied to remove stars with high surface gravity. The selection function of BHB star…

Promo-Fauxpas: Das sagt Jean-Remy von Matt zu seinem Auftritt bei Nius https://www.horizont.net/agenturen/nachrichten/promo-fauxpas-das-sagt-jean-r…

Promo-Fauxpas: Das sagt Jean-Remy von Matt zu seinem Auftritt bei Nius - HORIZONT
Mit seinem überraschenden Promo-Auftritt für sein Buch "Am Ende" bei Nius hat Jean-Remy von Matt für Aufsehen gesorgt - vor allem in der Werbebranche. In einem Podcast hat er jetzt erklärt, wie es zu dem Besuch bei dem rechtspopulistischen Sender kam und wie er im Nachhinein dazu steht.

Toward Optimal Statistical Inference in Noisy Linear Quadratic Reinforcement Learning over a Finite Horizon
Bo Pan, Jianya Lu, Yafei Wang, Hao Li, Bei Jiang, Linglong Kong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08436

Toward Optimal Statistical Inference in Noisy Linear Quadratic Reinforcement Learning over a Finite Horizon
Recent developments in Reinforcement learning have significantly enhanced sequential decision-making in uncertain environments. Despite their strong performance guarantees, most existing work has focused primarily on improving the operational accuracy of learned control policies and the convergence rates of learning algorithms, with comparatively little attention to uncertainty quantification and statistical inference. Yet, these aspects are essential for assessing the reliability and variabili…

The Fused Kernel Library: A C API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries
Oscar Amoros (Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya), Albert Andaluz (Independent researcher), Johnny Nunez (NVIDIA), Antonio J. Pena (Barcelona Supercomputing Center)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07071

The Fused Kernel Library: A C++ API to Develop Highly-Efficient GPU Libraries
Existing GPU libraries often struggle to fully exploit the parallel resources and on-chip memory (SRAM) of GPUs when chaining multiple GPU functions as individual kernels. While Kernel Fusion (KF) techniques like Horizontal Fusion (HF) and Vertical Fusion (VF) can mitigate this, current library implementations often require library developers to manually create fused kernels. Hence, library users rely on limited sets of pre-compiled or template-based fused kernels. This limits the use cases tha…

The Optical and Mechanical Design of POEMMA Balloon with Radio
Eric Mayotte (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Austin Cummings (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Paul Degarate (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Neville DeWitt Pierrat (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Johannes Eser (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), William Finch (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Julia Burton-Heibges (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Tobias Heibges (for the JEM-EUSO Collaboration), Eric Mentzell (for the JE…

The Optical and Mechanical Design of POEMMA Balloon with Radio
POEMMA Balloon with Radio (PBR) is a NASA super-pressure balloon mission building toward the proposed Probe Of Extreme Multi-Messenger Astrophysics (POEMMA) dual satellite mission. In its planned 2027 launch, PBR will study Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays, Neutrinos, and High-Altitude Horizontal Airshowers from 33 km above the Earth. By operating at balloon altitudes, PBR will provide a novel vantage point to study air-shower physics while offering competitive instantaneous exposure to neutrinos …