Tootfinder

Next week I will participate with the @… @… @… Horizon funded research projects in a policy briefing in Brussels, with MEP Group on Climate Change, Biodiversity & Sustainable Development @eupolarcluster.bsky.social
Remote participation possible if you're interested in what we have to say about Polar Science for Global Action and Strengthening Climate Preparedness through EU Leadership
https://polarres.eu/polarresevents/polar-science-for-global-action/

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

It's not that our politicians don't know what's needed to slow #ClimateChange. It's that they don't care.
Their two priorities are
1. winning the next election, under the UK's absurdly dysfunctional, archaic and undemocratic system;
2. pleasing the big donors, who include the

We surveyed British MPs – most don’t know how urgent climate action is
New study finds both MPs and the public underestimate how quickly global emissions must be cut.

Colts DT Buckner headed to IR with neck injury https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46883081/colts-dt-deforest-buckner-headed-ir-neck-injury

I can't believe Science In Action is ending! We're going to miss you @… !
A very serious warning encoded in this final episode for everyone to listen to.
How science got here, and where next
Episode webpage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct6yg7

5 reasons to submit your idea for #TNC26 Call for Proposals - Part 2
Next June, Helsinki 🇫🇮 will welcome our global R&E community under the theme Digital Sisu—inspired by the Finnish concept of “sisu:” inner strength, perseverance, and determination when things get tough.
In our digital era, sisu is about taking action, meeting challenges with courage, creativity, and collaboration to…

#Friday night firing massacre begins purge of #FederalWorkers including key #CDC medical experts at #HHS National Center for

VLA-Reasoner: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Models with Reasoning via Online Monte Carlo Tree Search
Wenkai Guo, Guanxing Lu, Haoyuan Deng, Zhenyu Wu, Yansong Tang, Ziwei Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22643

VLA-Reasoner: Empowering Vision-Language-Action Models with Reasoning via Online Monte Carlo Tree Search
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) achieve strong performance in general robotic manipulation tasks by scaling imitation learning. However, existing VLAs are limited to predicting short-sighted next-action, which struggle with long-horizon trajectory tasks due to incremental deviations. To address this problem, we propose a plug-in framework named VLA-Reasoner that effectively empowers off-the-shelf VLAs with the capability of foreseeing future states via test-time scaling. Specifically, VLA-…

From Next Token Prediction to (STRIPS) World Models -- Preliminary Results
Carlos N\'u\~nez-Molina, Vicen\c{c} G\'omez, Hector Geffner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13389 h…

From Next Token Prediction to (STRIPS) World Models -- Preliminary Results
We consider the problem of learning propositional STRIPS world models from action traces alone, using a deep learning architecture (transformers) and gradient descent. The task is cast as a supervised next token prediction problem where the tokens are the actions, and an action $a$ may follow an action sequence if the hidden effects of the previous actions do not make an action precondition of $a$ false. We show that a suitable transformer architecture can faithfully represent propositional STR…

wow cool did Sentry just fucking HALF the spans included in our plan!?
gotta love when a company introduces a feature you never asked for and doubles the price on a feature you care about
cool cool cool, no action required indeed

The film Blade Runner: poetic, beautiful and full of philosophy, with a fabulous cast and effects, has been a touchstone since it came out in 1982.
With misgivings I watched the profit-seeking 2017 attempt to milk the reverence in which the first film is held. It had its moments, but IMO it is largely a mediocre film.
Can we not leave perfection alone? Now, there's going to be a friggin TV series 😑

Blade Runner makes its live-action return next year
New series will star Michelle Yeoh and take place 50 years after the 2017 film.

5 reasons to submit your idea for #TNC26 Call for Proposals - Part 1
Next June, Helsinki 🇫🇮 will welcome our global R&E community under the theme Digital Sisu—inspired by the Finnish concept of “sisu:” inner strength, perseverance, and determination when things get tough.
In our digital era, sisu is about taking action, meeting challenges with courage, creativity, and collaboration to…

Structuring GUI Elements through Vision Language Models: Towards Action Space Generation
Yi Xu, Yesheng Zhang, jiajia Liu, Jingdong Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16271 https:/…

Structuring GUI Elements through Vision Language Models: Towards Action Space Generation
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have emerged as pivotal tools in enhancing human-computer interaction. In this paper we focus on the application of MLLMs in the field of graphical user interface (GUI) elements structuring, where they assist in processing user instructions based on screen contents. Despite the promise of MLLMs, their performance in precisely generating UI element coordinates, a critical aspect of GUI understanding, is hindered by the nature of next-token prediction trai…

Do Dallas Cowboys play today? Schedule for Week 11 game https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/news/do-dallas-cowboys-play-today-schedule-nfl-week-11-game

'The oldest defendant was 83-year-old the Reverend Susan Parfitt, from Bristol, who is partially deaf.
She gently held onto a hand rail in the courtroom as Judge Snow came down from the bench to sit next to her, so she could hear him"'
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c051g2

Palestine Action: Dozens in court over alleged support of banned group
About 2,000 people are likely to be charged, meaning 400 trials could need to be held.

REG4Rec: Reasoning-Enhanced Generative Model for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems
Haibo Xing, Hao Deng, Yucheng Mao, Jinxin Hu, Yi Xu, Hao Zhang, Jiahao Wang, Shizhun Wang, Yu Zhang, Xiaoyi Zeng, Jing Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15308

REG4Rec: Reasoning-Enhanced Generative Model for Large-Scale Recommendation Systems
Sequential recommendation aims to predict a user's next action in large-scale recommender systems. While traditional methods often suffer from insufficient information interaction, recent generative recommendation models partially address this issue by directly generating item predictions. To better capture user intents, recent studies have introduced a reasoning process into generative recommendation, significantly improving recommendation performance. However, these approaches are constrained…

Me and my new #yubikey5 part 2:
Now we get to the nitty-gritty parts. I'm using #mbsync to sync multiple #imap accounts to local

FlowVLA: Thinking in Motion with a Visual Chain of Thought
Zhide Zhong, Haodong Yan, Junfeng Li, Xiangchen Liu, Xin Gong, Wenxuan Song, Jiayi Chen, Haoang Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18269

FlowVLA: Thinking in Motion with a Visual Chain of Thought
Many Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely on an internal world model trained via next-frame prediction. This approach, however, struggles with physical reasoning as it entangles static appearance with dynamic motion, often resulting in implausible visual forecasts and inefficient policy learning. To address these limitations, we introduce the Visual Chain of Thought (Visual CoT): a pre-training framework that encourages a model to reason about how a scene evolves before predicting what it w…