Tootfinder

Wow, loving our greenhouse - already have the first tomatoes turning red! Only a couple weeks into summer (not even proper summer, 22 Dec in Aotearoa, yet) Crazy! This is months before we've ever had ripening fruit pre-greenhouse.

Prominent Italian investigative journalist Sigfrido Ranucci was targeted in a bomb attack near Rome; Ranucci has been under police protection for years (Angela Giuffrida/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/17/it…

Enbee at the botanical garden in Aarhus.

Fuc*ing lawnmower timing belt shredded itself again, mere minutes after fitting the replacement, suggesting buggered pulleys or similar 🤬 All this on what I hoped would be the last grass-cut of the year, long delayed as a result of all the damn rain.
Considering one of:
* sheep
* a robot mower with a direct motor-to-blade design
* paving the entire bloody garden

Australian household energy bills will⭐️ halve by 2050 ⭐️as solar panels, batteries and electric cars and appliances become the norm,
reducing pressure on the federal government over living costs and creating room for more climate action, a thinktank study suggests.
Modelling by the Grattan Institute finds that cutting greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation in line with the goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2050
will cut average household energy costs fro…

Wie sich mit KI verborgene geothermische Energiequellen aufspüren lassen
Standorte für Geothermie sind schwer zu entdecken. Das US-Startup Zanskar hat für die Suche jetzt ein KI-Modell integriert – und das ist schon fündig geworden.

Embedding the Teacher: Distilling vLLM Preferences for Scalable Image Retrieval
Eric He, Akash Gupta, Adian Liusie, Vatsal Raina, Piotr Molenda, Shirom Chabra, Vyas Raina
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.12014

Embedding the Teacher: Distilling vLLM Preferences for Scalable Image Retrieval
Text--image retrieval is necessary for applications such as product recommendation. Embedding-based approaches like CLIP enable efficient large-scale retrieval via vector similarity search, but they are primarily trained on literal caption-like text--image pairs and often fail to capture abstract or persona-driven attributes common in product recommendation applications (e.g., ``a gift for a mother who loves gardening''). In contrast, state-of-the-art vision--language models (vLLMs) can align t…

(Adaptive) Scaled gradient methods beyond locally Holder smoothness: Lyapunov analysis, convergence rate and complexity
Susan Ghaderi, Morteza Rahimi, Yves Moreau, Masoud Ahookhosh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10425 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.10425 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.10425
arXiv:2511.10425v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This paper addresses the unconstrained minimization of smooth convex functions whose gradients are locally Holder continuous. Building on these results, we analyze the Scaled Gradient Algorithm (SGA) under local smoothness assumptions, proving its global convergence and iteration complexity. Furthermore, under local strong convexity and the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) inequality, we establish linear convergence rates and provide explicit complexity bounds. In particular, we show that when the gradient is locally Lipschitz continuous, SGA attains linear convergence for any KL exponent. We then introduce and analyze an adaptive variant of SGA (AdaSGA), which automatically adjusts the scaling and step-size parameters. For this method, we show global convergence, and derive local linear rates under strong convexity.
toXiv_bot_toot

Garden ponds provide vital habitats – and a revival is under way in Britain https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/dec/04/garden-ponds-provide-vital-habitats-and-a-revival-is-under-way-in-britain

US companies are gathering for the spoils.
One contender, the Guardian has learned, is Gothams LLC, a politically connected contractor that won a $33m contract to help run the notorious south Florida detention center nicknamed
“Alligator Alcatraz”,
where immigrants are housed in tents and trailers.
Documents and three people familiar with the plans say that the contractor had an “inside track” to secure what might be the most lucrative contract it’s ever had.
Bu…