Tootfinder

Apparently DHH announced he’s moving to Linux; no big surprise there as there’s a sizable fraction of right-wing users of it (somewhere in the “rational-thinking, free speech, meritocracy & libertarian with a sprinkle of pseudoscience” oeuvre).
Something the Linux community has never managed to effectively deal with.

Cirque de Old Age

Roblox launches text-to-speech and speech-to-text APIs, and AI tools, including letting creators generate fully functional 3D objects from prompts, and more (Aisha Malik/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/05/robl

Roblox announces short-form video feed for gameplay clips, new AI tools for creators, and more | TechCrunch
Users can scroll through a feed of gameplay moments shared by the Roblox community and react to the clips using emojis, and jump into an experience right from a video.

If we are not terrified yet, then take a look at this...
https://apnews.com/article/national-conservativism-conference-schmitt-a27e3b489dcf768dbebfc927f5e4a1d0

National conservatism is reshaping the Republican Party
National conservatism is reshaping the Republican Party in President Donald Trump’s second term. This week, its leaders gathered in Washington to celebrate their rise and lay out their next steps. Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt delivered a speech titled “What is an American?” in which he criticized some legal immigration and declared, “America doesn’t belong to them — it belongs to us.” The conference featured top Trump officials, GOP lawmakers and right-wing figures. Panels focused o…

@… Yawn, I'm going to go ahead and use the block button now.
I suppose that stifles your speech on MY server too right?

"These days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you're English, don't you?"
These days you can't even openly advocate for the murder of vulnerable groups without the police getting involved.
https://www.theguard…

I'm waiting for the day when ALL newspaper, TV & radio news lead with actual FACTS:
"Trump Attacks YOUR Constitutional Right of Free Speech in America
-- breaking & violating the Oath of Office"
https://bsky.app/profile/truthseeker19.bs…

Your left and right brain hear language differently − a neuroscientist explains how https://theconversation.com/your-left-and-right-brain-hear-language-differently-a-neuroscientist-explains-how-257436

Your left and right brain hear language differently − a neuroscientist explains how
Left and right brains hear speech differently, yet how this divide forms was unclear − until mouse studies showed each hemisphere runs on its own developmental clock.

Some reactions to the current Indonesian protests:
- As far as the underlying issue goes, that of legislative pay, the protesters are in the wrong there, as legislators do actually deserve to be compensated for the extra expenses associated with the position
- That being said, the rights we consider "First Amendment rights" here in the US (speech, assembly, petitioning the government for redress of grievances) are fundamental and should be protected. The protesters have a right to protest even if they are wrong about legislative pay.
- Furthermore, police response to the protests has been disproportionately violent and fascistic. The death of a protester struck by a police vehicle shows the danger of both car culture and police militarization. Further protests on these two topics are necessary, and I stand in solidarity with any protesters speaking out against police brutality and vehicle deadliness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_2025_Indonesian_protests

A 4 March 2017 rally, billed as “March 4 Trump”,
was a response to a planned protest against a campus speech by the rightwing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,
then an alt-right darling but who would soon fall from grace after appearing to relativize pedophiliain a podcast appearance.
Archived posts from Black’s now-defunct Twitter/X account show him promoting the March event,
and whipping up alt-right supporters with images of the event in progress.
Clashes there r…

«I think it says that we are in a scary world where it is hard to tell if this is true or not. Like 10 years ago this wouldn’t even be a possibility but now it is very plausible. I think it shows a growing crack down on free speech and our rights. Bigger picture to me is that we are going to be unjustly held accountable for things that are much within our right to do/possess.»
'My Bad:' Babyface Vance Meme Creator On Norwegian Tourist's Detainment
https://www.404media.co/vance-babyface-meme-mads-mikkelsen-norway-tourist/

Quantum-Inspired Audio Unlearning: Towards Privacy-Preserving Voice Biometrics
Shreyansh Pathak, Sonu Shreshtha, Richa Singh, Mayank Vatsa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22208 https…

Quantum-Inspired Audio Unlearning: Towards Privacy-Preserving Voice Biometrics
The widespread adoption of voice-enabled authentication and audio biometric systems have significantly increased privacy vulnerabilities associated with sensitive speech data. Compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR's right to be forgotten and India's DPDP Act necessitates targeted and efficient erasure of individual-specific voice signatures from already-trained biometric models. Existing unlearning methods designed for visual data inadequately handle the sequential, temporal, and hig…

I’m not _in_ Mississippi, god damnit and thank god. I have an IP with a tn.comcast.net PTR, which comes from a /17 with an ARIN netname of “MEMPHIS9.” Your geolocation provider sucks ass, because _all_ geolocation providers suck ass, which is ultimately your problem and not mine because now I’m posting somewhere else. And fuck red states for getting us all into this censorious shitshow.
#Bluesky

‘I’m proud to have made this stand’: over-60s arrested at Palestine Action ban protest explain their decision https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-inter

Doublespeak, hypocrisy, and shameless lying are requirements to be a Republican these days.
#uspol #GOP #TrumpFascist

I have my share of issues with Parkrose Permaculture, but she has a lot of things I do strongly agree with. I can't stress enough that you never dehumanize your enemies. You can respond appropriately to violence. You can defend yourself from them by any means necessary. But you do not dehumanize them. You always limit your response to the minimum necessary to defend yourself.
There are a number of former Nazi skins who became antifascists after realizing they were wrong. Those folks tend to be some of the most dedicated because they feel a debt, and some of the most knowledgeable because they were there. Coming out of these types of cults, police included, is hard and takes time. A lot of us don't have the ability to work with them. But some do.
By repeatedly humanizing your opponent, you can break some of them. The #Seattle Police Department was not defunded but saw a massive reduction in numbers because their morale was destroyed. Some people will never change. Some people are broken and feel like they need the power. But if you change one person's mind, even give them something to think about, it's a crack. If even one cop quits, that's one less trained gun pointed at you in the future.
The 18 year old marines and federalized national guard troops out there are literally kids. A lot of them came from poor communities. They are being used in a way they haven't been trained to do, doing things they (should) have been told are not legal. They joined to get out of poverty, to go to college, or to "defend the American people" (regardless of how misguided that is). Few, if any, of them joined to abuse people. They will be especially open to persuasion.
Remind those troops that they are carrying out illegal orders, that they are being called on to violate their oath to protect the constitution, that they are suppressing the free speech of the fellow Americans they swore to defend. Remind them that the people they could be illegally arresting now are just like their parents, their neighbors, their families, the friends who didn't join. Remind them that this is the first step. They will be called on to kill Americans if they let this keep going.
Remind them ICE sleeps in hotels while they sleep on the ground. Remind them that their drunk and incompetent leadership thinks of them as disposable tools. Remind them that some of these people are out protesting *for them* against cuts to the VA and other services. Remind them that the people they're defending refuse to make college free so they can recruit from poor schools. Remind them that they will always be welcome when they're ready to join the side of freedom and justice.
When you dehumanize your enemies, you unify them. When you humanize your enemies, you can divide them. There is no weapon available to us right now so powerful as compassion.
https://youtu.be/YtWOYUDMsBw

The Johnson Amendment is not exactly a difficult law to parse.
To keep their sweet tax-exempt status, religious groups can’t endorse political candidates.
But evangelicals want to have their cake and eat it too. -- They don’t want to pay taxes, but they do want ministers to be able to climb into the pulpit and tell their flock who to vote for.
The "Alliance Defending Freedom", the hard-right law firm with a truly staggering track record of getting the United St…

Goodbye, separation of church and state
Churches now have extra special speech rights, thanks to Trump.

How ironic - the the maga-regime now is trying to block visas to visit the US on the grounds that the applicant believes in (and perhaps practices) our First Amendment right of free speech...
"New US visa rules will force foreign students to unlock social media profiles"
https://www.

Unifying Streaming and Non-streaming Zipformer-based ASR
Bidisha Sharma, Karthik Pandia Durai, Shankar Venkatesan, Jeena J Prakash, Shashi Kumar, Malolan Chetlur, Andreas Stolcke
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14434

Unifying Streaming and Non-streaming Zipformer-based ASR
There has been increasing interest in unifying streaming and non-streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to reduce development, training, and deployment costs. We present a unified framework that trains a single end-to-end ASR model for both streaming and non-streaming applications, leveraging future context information. We propose to use dynamic right-context through the chunked attention masking in the training of zipformer-based ASR models. We demonstrate that using right-context…

AI, AGI, and learning efficiency
My 4-month-old kid is not DDoSing Wikipedia right now, nor will they ever do so before learning to speak, read, or write. Their entire "training corpus" will not top even 100 million "tokens" before they can speak & understand language, and do so with real intentionally.
Just to emphasize that point: 100 words-per-minute times 60 minutes-per-hour times 12 hours-per-day times 365 days-per-year times 4 years is a mere 105,120,000 words. That's a ludicrously *high* estimate of words-per-minute and hours-per-day, and 4 years old (the age of my other kid) is well after basic speech capabilities are developed in many children, etc. More likely the available "training data" is at least 1 or 2 orders of magnitude less than this.
The point here is that large language models, trained as they are on multiple *billions* of tokens, are not developing their behavioral capabilities in a way that's remotely similar to humans, even if you believe those capabilities are similar (they are by certain very biased ways of measurement; they very much aren't by others). This idea that humans must be naturally good at acquiring language is an old one (see e.g. #AI #LLM #AGI