Tootfinder

Massive Supervised Fine-tuning Experiments Reveal How Data, Layer, and Training Factors Shape LLM Alignment Quality
Yuto Harada, Yusuke Yamauchi, Yusuke Oda, Yohei Oseki, Yusuke Miyao, Yu Takagi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14681

Massive Supervised Fine-tuning Experiments Reveal How Data, Layer, and Training Factors Shape LLM Alignment Quality
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a critical step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human instructions and values, yet many aspects of SFT remain poorly understood. We trained a wide range of base models on a variety of datasets including code generation, mathematical reasoning, and general-domain tasks, resulting in 1,000+ SFT models under controlled conditions. We then identified the dataset properties that matter most and examined the layer-wise modifications introduced by SFT. Our…

"""
"[…] Wanting a man got me into awful troubles more than once. But wanting to get married, never! No, no. None of that for me."
"Why not?" Tenar demanded.
Taken aback, Moss said simply, "Why, what man'd marry a witch?" And then, with a sidelong chewing motion of her jaw, like a sheep shifting its cud, “And what witch’d marry a man?"
They split rushes.
"What's wrong with men?" Tenar inquired cautiously.
As cautiously, lowering her voice, Moss replied, "I don't know, my dearie. I’ve thought on it. Often I’ve thought on it. The best I can say it is like this. A man’s in his skin, see, like a nut in its shell." She held up her long, bent, wet fingers as if holding a walnut. “It’s hard and strong, that shell, and it’s all full of him. Full of grand man-meat, man-self. And that’s all. That’s all there is. It’s all him and nothing else, inside."
Tenar pondered awhile and finally asked, "But if he's a wizard—"
"Then it's all his power, inside. His power’s himself, see. That’s how it is with him. And that’s all. When his power goes, he’s gone. Empty." She cracked the unseen walnut and tossed the shells away. “Nothing."
"And a woman, then?"
"Oh, well, dearie, a woman's a different thing entirely. Who knows where a woman begins and ends? Listen, mistress, I have roots, I have roots deeper than this island. Deeper than the sea, older than the raising of the lands. I go back into the dark." Moss’s eyes shone with a weird brightness in their red rims and her voice sang like an instrument. “I go back into the dark! Before the moon I was. No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, a woman’s power, deeper than the roots of trees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the Making, older than the moon. Who dares ask questions of the dark? Who’ll ask the dark its name?"
"""
(Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu)

with the bar for safe bike infrastructure as low as it is, it's hard to strike the right balance after a project between "hooray! it's so much better!" and "this, that, and the other thing still suck."
Streetsblog SF often errs on the latter side... I'm happier than ever with #ValenciaStreet, but their critiques are not wrong.

SFMTA Leaves Valencia Bike Lanes Unfinished - Streetsblog San Francisco
The center-running lane is long gone and some finishing touches are coming to the parking-protected section from 15th to 23rd, but the lack of concrete infrastructure remains problematic. And then there's the last four blocks from 23rd to Cesar Chavez, which is still just a striped lane wedged between parked cars and moving traffic.

"Eventually, I stopped responding to my body. I was responding instead to a dashboard." — @…
This is a great point and very much translates to so many other parts of life/work where people stop listening to their "body" (or to their org/product/offering), outsourcing/numbing/dumbing down their decision making based on dashboards of col…

Why I Gave Up My Smartwatch
Somewhere between the first time I tapped my wrist to skip a song and the three hundredth time I anxiously checked my resting heart rate, I started to hate my Apple Watch. The promise of the smartwatch was elegance, convenience, optimization. What I got was constant data drip, subtle panic,

Comparing observations of the closely located JUICE and STEREO-A spacecraft during the widespread solar energetic particle event of 2024 May 13
L. Rodr\'iguez-Garc\'ia, E. Palmerio, M. Pinto, N. Dresing, C. M. S. Cohen, R. G\'omez-Herrero, J. Gieseler, F. Santos, F. Espinosa Lara, I. Cernuda, M. Mewes, C. Vallat, O. Witasse, N. Altobelli
…

Comparing observations of the closely located JUICE and STEREO-A spacecraft during the widespread solar energetic particle event of 2024 May 13
JUICE was launched in April 2023, and it is now in its cruise phase to Jupiter, where it is scheduled to arrive in July 2031. JUICE carries a radiation monitor, namely the RADiation hard Electron Monitor (RADEM) to measure protons, electrons, and ions, detecting particles coming mainly from the anti-Sun direction. On 2024 May 13, a large solar energetic particle (SEP) event took place in association with an eruption close to the western limb of the Sun as seen from Earth. Providentially, at tha…

Marina Hyde is a brilliant columnist:
Imagine owning the world’s premier shitposting platform – in fact, having spent $44bn on it, specifically so that your magic mirror would tell you each day that you were the fairest shitposter of all – and then shuffling sheepishly on to your own pixels to mumble something about having gone “too far” with your hurty words.

Why M-dwarf flares have limited impact on sub-Neptunes' atmospheric evaporation
Andrea Caldiroli, Francesco Haardt, Elena Gallo, George King, Juliette Becker, Federico Biassoni, Riccardo Spinelli
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08014

Why M-dwarf flares have limited impact on sub-Neptunes' atmospheric evaporation
M-type stars are prime targets for exoplanet searches within their habitable zones (HZs). M-type stars also exhibit significant magnetic flaring activity, especially during the first billion years, which can potentially accelerate the evaporation of the hydrogen-helium envelopes of close-in planets. We use the time-dependent photo-ionization hydrodynamics code ATES to investigate the impact of flares on atmospheric escape, focusing on a sub-Neptune-sized planet orbiting an early M-type star at …