Tootfinder

Musk's Starlink alone owns two-thirds of all satellites in space.
With 8,000 in low Earth orbit, the company currently has permission to launch a further 4,000,
and has reportedly filed paperwork to raise the total number to 42,000.
Amazon and a state-backed project from China have their own rivals to Starlink in the works,
all of which would see the numbers vastly multiply,
with some estimates that in a decade there could be 100,000 satellites in orbit.

Here are my favourites from the National Portrait Gallery's Portrait Award 2025. It's a fantastic selection this year, and free to see as always.
#art #portraits #painting

When we have something novel and unfamiliar like LLMs, especially something that hijacks our existing intuitions and provokes all kids of strong gut responses, seeing it as it really is requires multiple ways of seeing. And not just multiple •people• seeing it in multiple ways, but •individuals• who can have conversations across boundaries, take on multiple perspectives and synthesize them.
I am very anti-self-narrowing. Be large! Contain multitudes!

"The TR-1000 is here! Roland’s first analog drum machine since the TR-909 in 1983. The company painstakingly recreated the analog circuits of 16 of the sounds from the TR-808 and TR-909 using modern components." #music #drummachine

For several years
– since conservatives, gained a six-three majority on the bench thanks to Donald Trump’s nominations during his first presidency
– the court has been delivering transformative rulings that have reverberated across the social and political landscape.
In 2022, it overturned Roe v Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion that had existed for nearly half-a-century.
In July 2024, in a far-reaching decision, it granted Trump
– and, by exten…

Series A, Episode 05 - The Web
NOVARA: Flutonic power cells. As you can see from the registers one of them is totally exhausted. The other almost so.
BLAKE: And you have no means of recharging them.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/105/349 B7B5

V.I.P. : Iterative Online Preference Distillation for Efficient Video Diffusion Models
Jisoo Kim, Wooseok Seo, Junwan Kim, Seungho Park, Sooyeon Park, Youngjae Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03254

V.I.P. : Iterative Online Preference Distillation for Efficient Video Diffusion Models
With growing interest in deploying text-to-video (T2V) models in resource-constrained environments, reducing their high computational cost has become crucial, leading to extensive research on pruning and knowledge distillation methods while maintaining performance. However, existing distillation methods primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which often leads to mode collapse as pruned models with reduced capacity fail to directly match the teacher's outputs, ultimately resulting in de…

Cognitive Loop via In-Situ Optimization: Self-Adaptive Reasoning for Science
Newman Cheng, Gordon Broadbent, William Chappell
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02789 https://

Cognitive Loop via In-Situ Optimization: Self-Adaptive Reasoning for Science
The capacity for artificial intelligence (AI) to formulate, evolve, and test altered thought patterns under dynamic conditions indicates advanced cognition that is crucial for scientific discovery. The existing AI development landscape falls into two categories: 1) frameworks over non-reasoning models that natively incorporate opinions on how humans think, and 2) reasoning models that abstract precise control of the reasoning intuition away from end users. While powerful, for scientists to maxi…

UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies
Harsh Gupta, Xiaofeng Guo, Huy Ha, Chuer Pan, Muqing Cao, Dongjae Lee, Sebastian Sherer, Shuran Song, Guanya Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02614

UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies
We introduce UMI-on-Air, a framework for embodiment-aware deployment of embodiment-agnostic manipulation policies. Our approach leverages diverse, unconstrained human demonstrations collected with a handheld gripper (UMI) to train generalizable visuomotor policies. A central challenge in transferring these policies to constrained robotic embodiments-such as aerial manipulators-is the mismatch in control and robot dynamics, which often leads to out-of-distribution behaviors and poor execution. T…

Nemori: Self-Organizing Agent Memory Inspired by Cognitive Science
Jiayan Nan, Wenquan Ma, Wenlong Wu, Yize Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03341 https://a…

Nemori: Self-Organizing Agent Memory Inspired by Cognitive Science
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, yet their inability to maintain persistent memory in long contexts limits their effectiveness as autonomous agents in long-term interactions. While existing memory systems have made progress, their reliance on arbitrary granularity for defining the basic memory unit and passive, rule-based mechanisms for knowledge extraction limits their capacity for genuine learning and evolution. To address these foundational limitations, we pr…