Tootfinder

Six of nine universities that were asked to sign an agreement in exchange for funding advantages have rejected the offer ahead of Today’s deadline for response
Within a day of the call,
University of Virginia and Dartmouth College rejected the compact,
joining ranks with MIT,
Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the
University of Southern California.
The University of Texas at Austin was invited to sign on and the chair of the University o…

White House hits road block in effort to get top colleges to sign deal
Six of nine universities that were asked to sign an agreement in exchange for funding advantages have rejected the offer ahead of Monday’s deadline for responses

Kick says it is "urgently reviewing" the circumstances of the death of a French livestreamer who was subjected to violence and sleep deprivation during streams (Tom McArthur/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mpjplk4pxo

Investigation into 'horrifying' death of French streamer
Raphaël Graven, also known as Jeanpormanove, was found dead at a residence in Contes, a village north of Nice, prosecutors said.

Kick says it is "urgently reviewing" the circumstances of the death of a French livestreamer who was subjected to violence and sleep deprivation during streams (Tom McArthur/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1mpjplk4pxo

Investigation into 'horrifying' death of French streamer
Raphaël Graven, also known as Jeanpormanove, was found dead at a residence in Contes, a village north of Nice, prosecutors said.

If you've been paying attention, this is a *very* strong signal that OpenAI is hitting the limits of improved capability with more compute/data and they're (predictably) all out of other ideas. The quiet "exponential model capabilities" lie here is what Altmann promised but is now starting not to be able to deliver, even in cherry-picked demo terms.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-altman-says-agi-is-a-pointless-term-experts-agree.html
The "agentic" turn was never going to pan out, because it exposes the unreliability of LLMs too directly, and it turns out that no amount of yelling at your text vending machine to "Be smarter! Think harder!" will actually get you anything more than vended text.
I'm *praying* that we get into this crash sooner rather than later, since the faster it comes, the less painful it will be.
My recent reading in actual research papers corroborates this, for example, asking LLMs to play games exposes their utter lack of anything that can be termed "reasoning":
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08501v1

Scattered Spider Member Sentenced to 10 Years in String of Hacks
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-20/scattered-s…

Geodesic convexity and strengthened functional inequalities in submanifolds of Wasserstein space
Louis-Pierre Chaintron (DMA), Daniel Lacker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13698 htt…

Geodesic convexity and strengthened functional inequalities in submanifolds of Wasserstein space
We study the geodesic convexity of various energy and entropy functionals restricted to (non-geodesically convex) submanifolds of Wasserstein spaces with their induced geometry. We prove a variety of convexity results by means of a simple general principle, which holds in the metric space setting, and which crucially requires no knowledge of the structure of geodesics in the submanifold: If the EVI gradient flow of a functional exists and leaves the submanifold invariant, then the restriction o…

Compact representation of maximal palindromes
Takuya Mieno
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14384 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.14384…

Compact representation of maximal palindromes
Palindromes are strings that read the same forward and backward. The computation of palindromic structures within strings is a fundamental problem in string algorithms, being motivated by potential applications in formal language theory and bioinformatics. Although the number of palindromic factors in a string of length $n$ can be quadratic, they can be implicitly represented in $O(n \log n)$ bits of space by storing the lengths of all maximal palindromes in an integer array, which can be compu…

ReCoVeR the Target Language: Language Steering without Sacrificing Task Performance
Hannah Sterz, Fabian David Schmidt, Goran Glava\v{s}, Ivan Vuli\'c
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14814

ReCoVeR the Target Language: Language Steering without Sacrificing Task Performance
As they become increasingly multilingual, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit more language confusion, i.e., they tend to generate answers in a language different from the language of the prompt or the answer language explicitly requested by the user. In this work, we propose ReCoVeR (REducing language COnfusion in VEctor Representations), a novel lightweight approach for reducing language confusion based on language-specific steering vectors. We first isolate language vectors with the help of…

I live by the conviction that anarchism is not a fixed goal to be reached, nor a perfect order to be imposed upon life. Every system that claims finality becomes a prison, and every so‑called final solution turns into domination over human beings. Anarchism, for me, stands in opposition to this tendency, it is the refusal to accept limits set by authority, dogma, or any power that seeks to bind the living stream of human development.
To me, anarchism is not the end of history, but the …

Trump's tactics against the media resemble approaches used by authoritarian leaders in other countries, such as Hungary and Serbia, to curtail critical coverage (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-dictators-medi…

Trump's attacks on media echo authoritarians who silence dissent
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has waged an aggressive campaign against the media unlike any in modern U.S. history, making moves similar to those of authoritarian leaders that he has often praised. On Wednesday, Trump cheered ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the comedian made remarks about the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk that criticized the president’s MAGA movement. It was the latest in a string of attacks against n…