Tootfinder

* gxam wonders if all these globals are really necessary
<Knghtbrd> most of them at the moment yes
<Knghtbrd> we REALLY need to clean them up at some point
<Knghtbrd> gxam: the globals will have to go away as we migrate towards
modularity and madness (ie, libtool)

Somebody at Apple had a meeting and came out of it saying, “Yes. Put Freeform in the dock by default. On every Mac.” #imaginethemeeting

When you decide to add more CDs to my Discogs page!
Yes, I prefer physical media over streaming, any day of the year.
#Bandcamp
https://bandcamp.com/pmarg

Toronto Star: “New numbers reveal 10,000-plus Ontario college layoffs, 600 programs cancelled or suspended over past year”
The bloodbath in our higher education system in Canada has gotten NO press even though provincial governments and likely federal KNOW. This is the first in depth article I have seen. ALL governments micro-manage university and college policy/finances, no matter what they might say to the contrary.
Here are some truths you need to know:
Yes, I am biased as a 25 year employee of a University.
Yes, my University has also had completely unprecedented cuts in the past 12-24 months, with more coming.
Yes, it is because of the loss of International Students and their tuition revenue. Without that loss, many domestic enrollment numbers have actually been growing, but the money per student is orders of magnitude less. (ie. International was a cash cow)
Yes, faculty and even many admin, have been warning about the government downloading funding onto International tuitions for decades.
Yes, government will claim they are “investing more than ever”, but this is usually about Capital expenses (buildings, residences, infrastructure) or meeting contractual increases for staff salaries, *not* operating expenses.
Yes, in BC in the 1980s 80-90% of a University or College operating budget was covered by “base funding” from the province. Now, it is often below 50%. (If this makes you ask… is it still a “public University system”, please do!!)
And finally, yes, if we want to consider ourselves a modern country, we cannot possibly think this kind of contraction in educational opportunity (while domestic tuitions continue to increase!) is at all healthy for our society as a whole.
Toronto Star: #canpoli #cdnpoli #education #internationalEd #immigration #postsecondary #educationShouldBeFree

Why yes, I am standing in line for the Switch 2 release at “midnight”.
Glad I’m not on the east coast where the sun has actually set already.

Diarization-Aware Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition via Large Language Models
Yuke Lin, Ming Cheng, Ze Li, Beilong Tang, Ming Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05796

Diarization-Aware Multi-Speaker Automatic Speech Recognition via Large Language Models
Multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (MS-ASR) faces significant challenges in transcribing overlapped speech, a task critical for applications like meeting transcription and conversational analysis. While serialized output training (SOT)-style methods serve as common solutions, they often discard absolute timing information, limiting their utility in time-sensitive scenarios. Leveraging recent advances in large language models (LLMs) for conversational audio processing, we propose a novel…

Esoteric Language Models
Subham Sekhar Sahoo, Zhihan Yang, Yash Akhauri, Johnna Liu, Deepansha Singh, Zhoujun Cheng, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, John Thickstun, Arash Vahdat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01928

Esoteric Language Models
Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Among this family of models, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) achieve the strongest performance but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficiency features--most notably, KV caching. In this work, we introduce Eso-LMs, a new family of models that fuses AR and MDM paradigms, enabling smooth interpolation between their perp…

My knee-jerk reaction to this article from @… was a cynical [citation needed] re “artists from all mediums emphatically support the use of AI.”
On further reflection…well, that’s still my response to the eyeball-grabbing lede, yes, but the actual article is what I wish we’d had instead of this inane hype avalanche:
Artists poking at the new thing, playing with it, finding its possibilities, critiquing it, problematizing it, asking us to ask what it is, helping us see it with fresh eyes from many angles. https://infosec.exchange/@adamshostack/114704865574139727