Tootfinder

I recently researched the etymology of two interesting German words:
- "nonchalant" (informal, relaxed, casual, carefree, easy-going): I found that interesting because it's obviously a negation and I never read the non-negated form "chalant". Turns out that the non-negated form goes back to latin "calēre" (warm, to be hot, to be alarmed, to be fired up)
- "verschollen" (lost, missing, nothing has been known about the whereabouts of sth. or sb. for a long time). I found it weird because I couldn't make any sense of "schollen". This might be related to "verschallen" (stop making noise) and might go back to old high German "skellan" (which is also related to German "Schelle", a small bell). So, "verschollen" can be seen as a euphemistic expression because stop making noise is used to refer to being lost (and maybe dead).
#etymology #linguistics #German

ResearStudio: A Human-Intervenable Framework for Building Controllable Deep-Research Agents
Linyi Yang, Yixuan Weng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12194 https://

ResearStudio: A Human-Intervenable Framework for Building Controllable Deep-Research Agents
Current deep-research agents run in a ''fire-and-forget'' mode: once started, they give users no way to fix errors or add expert knowledge during execution. We present ResearStudio, the first open-source framework that places real-time human control at its core. The system follows a Collaborative Workshop design. A hierarchical Planner-Executor writes every step to a live ''plan-as-document,'' a fast communication layer streams each action, file change, and tool call to a web interface. At any …

Ach deshalb will Sozialministerin Bas (SPD) die Mieterstattung beim Bürgergeld eingrenzen!
From: @…
https://ard.social/@tagesschau/115367278233270651

Resource-sensitive but language-blind: Community size and not grammatical complexity better predicts the accuracy of Large Language Models in a novel Wug Test
Nikoleta Pantelidou, Evelina Leivada, Paolo Morosi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12463

Resource-sensitive but language-blind: Community size and not grammatical complexity better predicts the accuracy of Large Language Models in a novel Wug Test
The linguistic abilities of Large Language Models are a matter of ongoing debate. This study contributes to this discussion by investigating model performance in a morphological generalization task that involves novel words. Using a multilingual adaptation of the Wug Test, six models were tested across four partially unrelated languages (Catalan, English, Greek, and Spanish) and compared with human speakers. The aim is to determine whether model accuracy approximates human competence and whethe…

eye2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Eye Movement for Program Comprehension Analysis
Haruhiko Yoshioka, Kazumasa Shimari, Hidetake Uwano, Kenichi Matsumoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11722 …

eye2vec: Learning Distributed Representations of Eye Movement for Program Comprehension Analysis
This paper presents eye2vec, an infrastructure for analyzing software developers' eye movements while reading source code. In common eye-tracking studies in program comprehension, researchers must preselect analysis targets such as control flow or syntactic elements, and then develop analysis methods to extract appropriate metrics from the fixation for source code. Here, researchers can define various levels of AOIs like words, lines, or code blocks, and the difference leads to different result…

Language conversations have become highly performative,
with a fixation on the words people are using,
not why they’re using them
or what they’re reaching for when they deploy language
like “crazy,” “lame,” or the r-word
(currently experiencing a resurgence in popularitythanks to Elon Musk).
The language is a metaphor:
We call something “insane” because that word carries a specific baggage and burden.
But the fact that mental illness is stil…

Language Wars
Conversations about language were supposed to be a starting point rather than an ending one.

[Apropos Felsen in der chinesischen Gartenarchitektur: ein rascher Einblick]
https://www.lanseichina.com/blogs/inspire-through-words/rockeries

7 stones used in Chinese classical gardens as rockeries
There is no Chinese classical garden without stones. The inanimate stones are endowed with meaning far beyond real rocks by traditional Chinese Zen, philosophy and aesthetics. When the ancients built gardens, they gave the rockery a nice name - "掇山" （Picking mountains). Stone selection is the first step in crafting roc

Kernel ridge regression under power-law data: spectrum and generalization
Arie Wortsman, Bruno Loureiro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04780 https://arxiv.org/…

Kernel ridge regression under power-law data: spectrum and generalization
In this work, we investigate high-dimensional kernel ridge regression (KRR) on i.i.d. Gaussian data with anisotropic power-law covariance. This setting differs fundamentally from the classical source & capacity conditions for KRR, where power-law assumptions are typically imposed on the kernel eigen-spectrum itself. Our contributions are twofold. First, we derive an explicit characterization of the kernel spectrum for polynomial inner-product kernels, giving a precise description of how the ker…

Fine-grained Analysis of Brain-LLM Alignment through Input Attribution
Michela Proietti, Roberto Capobianco, Mariya Toneva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12355 https://

Fine-grained Analysis of Brain-LLM Alignment through Input Attribution
Understanding the alignment between large language models (LLMs) and human brain activity can reveal computational principles underlying language processing. We introduce a fine-grained input attribution method to identify the specific words most important for brain-LLM alignment, and leverage it to study a contentious research question about brain-LLM alignment: the relationship between brain alignment (BA) and next-word prediction (NWP). Our findings reveal that BA and NWP rely on largely dis…

Well-researched & surprisingly insightful analysis of Bond. And humorous!
▶️ The Daniel Craig James Bond Era Is The Weirdest Franchise Ever
https://youtube.com/watch?v=8bNXqwpm-rk&si=JIN92QB-Q92vTkz-