Tootfinder

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.

Speaking mildly ill of the dead is now punishable by deportation
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/12/2343050/-Speaking-mildly-ill-of-the-dead-is-now-punishable-by-deportation

Es ist wieder #SchiffsSamstag. Heute mit dem norwegischen Vollschiff CHRISTIAN RADICH und rechts daneben einem Nachbau der SANTA MARIA, einer Nao bzw. Karakke.

Spagnola: Previous success doesn’t mean squat https://www.dallascowboys.com/news/spagnola-previous-success-doesn-t-mean-squat

(Bruce) Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law:
Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.

Obesity & diet
I wouldn't normally share a positive story about the new diet drugs, because I've seen someone get obsessed with them who was at a perfectly acceptable weight *by majority standards* (surprise: every weight is in fact perfectly acceptable by *objective* standards, because every "weight-associated" health risk is its own danger that should be assessed *in individuals*). I think two almost-contradictory things:
1. In a society shuddering under the burden of metastasized fatmisia, there's a very real danger in promoting the new diet drugs because lots of people who really don't need them will be psychologically bullied into using them and suffer from the cost and/or side effects.
2. For many individuals under the assault of our society's fatmisia, "just ignore it" is not a sufficient response, and also for specific people for whom decreasing their weight can address *specific* health risks/conditions that they *want* to address that way, these drugs can be a useful tool.
I know @… to be a trustworthy & considerate person, so I think it's responsible to share this:
#Fat #Diet #Obesity

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…