Tootfinder

I’ve spoken with my boss (he’s a bit of a dickhead but his heart’s in the right place) and confirmed that I won’t be getting fired for opposing Israel’s ongoing genocide and supporting the human rights of the Palestinian people to live with freedom and dignity like the rest of us but not everyone is as lucky.

Pro-Palestinian influencer Dr. Nahla Al-Sarraj fired following Zionist smear campaign
Dr. Nahla Al-Sarraj gained hundreds of thousands of social media followers by discussing the Gaza genocide. She was fired after a pressure campaign from Israel lobby groups that she believes aimed to silence her. Despite this, she remains unbowed.

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

The Speech-LLM Takes It All: A Truly Fully End-to-End Spoken Dialogue State Tracking Approach
Nizar El Ghazal, Antoine Caubri\`ere, Valentin Vielzeuf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09424

The Speech-LLM Takes It All: A Truly Fully End-to-End Spoken Dialogue State Tracking Approach
This paper presents a comparative study of context management strategies for end-to-end Spoken Dialog State Tracking using Speech-LLMs. We systematically evaluate traditional multimodal context (combining text history and spoken current turn), full spoken history, and compressed spoken history approaches. Our experiments on the SpokenWOZ corpus demonstrate that providing the full spoken conversation as input yields the highest performance among models of similar size, significantly surpassing p…

A look at Cybathlon, an event by ETH Zurich where researchers team up with people with disabilities in a competition to test brain-computer interfaces (Oliver Whang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/scien…

At the Cybathlon, May the Best Brain-Computer Interface Win
Every four years at the Cybathlon, teams of researchers and technology “pilots” compete to see whose brain-computer interface holds the most promise.

Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institutes of Health, says she has been put on paid leave following the end of the government shutdown.
"I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I have been witnessing inside the National Institutes of Health," she said in a video posted to TikTok.
The notice Norton received from human resources stated that the…

unicodelang: Languages spoken by country (2015)
A bipartite network of languages and the countries in which they are spoken, as estimated by Unicode. Edges are weighted by the proportion of the given country's population that is literate in a particular language.
This network has 868 nodes and 1255 edges.
Tags: Informational, Relatedness, Weighted

Es ist #SchiffsSamstag. Da es gerade auf Weihnachten zu geht, möchte ich daran erinnern, dass ein großer Teil der verschenkten Güter, aber auch der zum Fest einfach dazu gehörenden Südfrüchte per Schiff kommt.
Mein Foto zeigt einen Feeder bei Eisgang auf der Unterelbe. Ein "kleiner" Containerschiffs-Typ der als Zubringer für die gigantischen Übersee-Containerschiffe dient. …

Mind-Paced Speaking: A Dual-Brain Approach to Real-Time Reasoning in Spoken Language Models
Donghang Wu (Tony), Haoyang Zhang (Tony), Jun Chen (Tony), Xiangyu (Tony), Zhang, Hexin Liu, Eng Siong Chng, Fei Tian, Xuerui Yang, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Gang Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09592

Mind-Paced Speaking: A Dual-Brain Approach to Real-Time Reasoning in Spoken Language Models
Real-time Spoken Language Models (SLMs) struggle to leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning due to the prohibitive latency of generating the entire thought process sequentially. Enabling SLMs to think while speaking, similar to humans, is attracting increasing attention. We present, for the first time, Mind-Paced Speaking (MPS), a brain-inspired framework that enables high-fidelity, real-time reasoning. Similar to how humans utilize distinct brain regions for thinking and responding, we propo…

On Monday, Trump said
neither bidding party
“are friends of mine.”
He added that he had not spoken to his son- in-law Jared Kushner about the Paramount bid.
Netflix’s bid has already drawn sharp criticism from bipartisan lawmakers and Hollywood unions
over concerns that it could lead to job cuts as well as higher prices for consumers.
“While it is perhaps a sad commentary on the US that Paramount thinks its closeness to the occupant of the Oval Office wil…

NTV Kenya: Warner Bros fight heats up as Paramount counters Netflix with $108bn hostile bid
Paramount Skydance on Monday launched a hostile bid worth $108.4 billion for Warner Bros Discovery,

The Biden administration may have shot the serif,
switching from Times New Roman font on the grounds that serif-less fonts such as Calibri are more accessible to readers with disabilities.
That’s all over now.
The State Department Action Request reads:
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products
and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] program,
the Department is return…

Marco Rubio Has Spoken! Please Remove All of Your Woke Fonts.
Marco Rubio has spoken—get out of here, Calibri!