Tootfinder

If you are not an expert on how our DNA works and how it forms who we are: read this masterpiece of Philip Ball:
https://www.marginaliareviewofbooks.com/post/alpha-genome

AlphaGenome: On the Promise and Limits of AI in Science
PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for example by viruses inserting their genetic material into ours, and it did nothing useful but just cluttered up our genome the way all our old detritus of a lifetime clutters up our attic.

Guten Morgen, Prinzipienreiter.

Trump’s pledge to raise the global baseline tariff rate from 10% to 15% is reverberating across markets, with investors now weighing whether a recent rally in overseas equities can hold.
In a post on TruthSocial, Trump said he would immediately increase the worldwide tariff rate to 15% following a Supreme Court decision related to trade authority. He also signaled that additional, “legally permissible” tariffs could be introduced in the coming months, reinforcing a more aggressive trade…

Kolanovic warns of reversal in overseas stocks after Trump signals tariff hike — Seeking Alpha
President Donald Trump’s pledge to raise the global baseline tariff rate from 10% to 15% is reverberating across markets, with investors now weighing whether a recent rally in overseas equities can hold.

UrbanFM: Scaling Urban Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models
Wei Chen, Yuqian Wu, Junle Chen, Xiaofang Zhou, Yuxuan Liang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20677 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20677 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20677
arXiv:2602.20677v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Urban systems, as dynamic complex systems, continuously generate spatio-temporal data streams that encode the fundamental laws of human mobility and city evolution. While AI for Science has witnessed the transformative power of foundation models in disciplines like genomics and meteorology, urban computing remains fragmented due to "scenario-specific" models, which are overfitted to specific regions or tasks, hindering their generalizability. To bridge this gap and advance spatio-temporal foundation models for urban systems, we adopt scaling as the central perspective and systematically investigate two key questions: what to scale and how to scale. Grounded in first-principles analysis, we identify three critical dimensions: heterogeneity, correlation, and dynamics, aligning these principles with the fundamental scientific properties of urban spatio-temporal data. Specifically, to address heterogeneity through data scaling, we construct WorldST. This billion-scale corpus standardizes diverse physical signals, such as traffic flow and speed, from over 100 global cities into a unified data format. To enable computation scaling for modeling correlations, we introduce the MiniST unit, a novel split mechanism that discretizes continuous spatio-temporal fields into learnable computational units to unify representations of grid-based and sensor-based observations. Finally, addressing dynamics via architecture scaling, we propose UrbanFM, a minimalist self-attention architecture designed with limited inductive biases to autonomously learn dynamic spatio-temporal dependencies from massive data. Furthermore, we establish EvalST, the largest-scale urban spatio-temporal benchmark to date. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UrbanFM achieves remarkable zero-shot generalization across unseen cities and tasks, marking a pivotal first step toward large-scale urban spatio-temporal foundation models.
toXiv_bot_toot

Philip Ball:
"There’s a broader issue at stake here too that pertains to the place of AI in scientific research. Too often now, we hear claims of how AI will replace human scientists and, in doing so, will solve our most pressing problems: curing all disease, solving climate change, figuring out how to conduct nuclear fusion. Such claims are never supported by experts in those fields—and that’s not because they want to convince us that they are indispensable after all. Rather, it i…

AlphaGenome: On the Promise and Limits of AI in Science
PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for example by viruses inserting their genetic material into ours, and it did nothing useful but just cluttered up our genome the way all our old detritus of a lifetime clutters up our attic.

Brands complain Amazon's "Buy for Me" AI-powered shopping tool features their products on Amazon without permission and shows descriptions with errors (Allison Smith/Modern Retail)
https://www.modernretail.co/technology/bra

Brands are upset that ‘Buy For Me’ is featuring their products on Amazon without permission
Online merchants say Amazon’s “Buy for Me” AI tool listed their products without permission, forcing them to opt out after the fact.

Hunaja­marinoitu valhe! Allekirjoita vetoomus ja vaadi parannuksia lakiin ja harhaanjohtavaa markkinointia kuriin! https://oikeuttaelaimille.fi/broileri/
Hunajamarinoitu valhe - Broilerintuotannon harhaanjohtava markkinointi

Hunajamarinoitu valhe | Oikeutta eläimille
Broilerikasvatus on tehotuotantoa äärimmäisimmillään, mutta sen markkinoinnissa vilisevät mielikuvat kuten kotimaisuus, puhtaus, työ ja hyvinvointi. Allekirjoita vetoomus ja vaadi parannuksia lakiin ja harhaanjohtavaa markkinointia kuriin!

> Our conclusion is clear: AI is promising for quality assurance and marker training, but for the moment it’s nowhere near ready to take over high stakes marking.
https://ofqual.blog.gov.uk/2026/01/14/using-ai-in-mar…

Using AI in marking: why technical capability, fairness, and transparency all matter
Ofqual has published new research exploring artificial intelligence’s potential role in marking, as well as its current capabilities and constraints. Rather than providing definitive answers, the published working paper offers an overview of the topic, shares our current thinking, highlights …

acid tests @… forensics update: an eagle-eyed head noticed that the merry pranksters' full film includes 45 seconds of silent footage of the velvet underground (!), likely shot at the exploding plastic inevitable in LA or san francisco, may 1966. …

bob dylan, having a totally normal one & posting excerpts from what purports to be a forthcoming science fiction novel to his instagram (though doesn't exactly say who wrote it or when it might be forthcoming). https://www.instagram.com/p/DTnwybFEXwi/