Tootfinder

The global economy is projected to slow sharply this year
as Trump’s trade policy disrupts international commerce and increases economic uncertainty,
the World Bank said on Tuesday in a report that underscores the toll of America’s trade war.
Despite the weakening outlook, the global economy is not expected to fall into a recession, the World Bank said.
However, the trade tension is setting the stage for the weakest decade of growth since the 1960s.
Economic dev…

World Bank Forecast Underscores Cost of U.S. Trade War
Along with a sharply downgraded projection for global output this year, it urged a “course correction” on trade to help preserve living standards.

Just quietly, I spent a lot of November- April mentally preparing myself for a Trump-alike in Australia.
That resoundingly didn't happen, I am so thankful!! Whatever faults Albanese has, he is not Dutton and doesn't have Dutton's track record of racism/anti-immigration.
But I am noticing myself being cautious and self-censoring when responding to posts about the US. Even when I'm simply liking pro-democracy, pro-rule-of-law content! I guess I'm not ready to let my guard down yet

📣 Another great milestone for the #GÉANT project!
The GN5-1 project has successfully completed its final review by the European Commission—recognising strong performance, technical achievements, and commitment to innovation and sustainability, all aligned with the Horizon Europe programme’s goals.
👏 A big thank you to all contributors involved. Your dedication continues to drive our …

GÉANT’s GN5-1 Project completes another successful EC Review | GÉANT CONNECT Online
GÉANT’s GN5-1 project has successfully completed the Period 2 review by the European Commission (EC), marking another key milestone in the project’s continued delivery of cutting-edge networking and collaboration services to Europe’s research and education community. The review, which took place at the end of March 2025, covered the second reporting period of the project.

I've never written a novel or any other intensely-plotted work of fiction, but anyone who has read or watched it played a lot of stories can probably also recognize that some authors just aren't good at endings. They're great at setting things in motion, at keeping the twists and turns coming, at the soap opera style of drama. But they just don't have the craft necessary to tie things together into a satisfying conclusion. I imagine it's much harder than the process of getting things going out keeping them moving, since you both have to wind down all the various threads you've spun up and balance satisfaction with believability.
I just finished Girl Gone Viral by Arvin Ahmadi, and it has a bad ending. The beginning is fine, the middle has plenty of drama to keep you wanting to see what happens, but the ending is murky, unsatisfying, and manages neither veracity nor satisfaction (even discounting the biggest next step that might reasonably have been left there to make room for a sequel).
Given the other issues with the book, from poor politics, to inauthentic characters, to a techno-optimism that feels as bitter in this moment as it is far from the mark in its predictions, I can't recommended it, despite having read through to the end.
#AmReading

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24380 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csCV_…

SASP: Strip-Aware Spatial Perception for Fine-Grained Bird Image Classification
Fine-grained bird image classification (FBIC) is not only of great significance for ecological monitoring and species identification, but also holds broad research value in the fields of image recognition and fine-grained visual modeling. Compared with general image classification tasks, FBIC poses more formidable challenges: 1) the differences in species size and imaging distance result in the varying sizes of birds presented in the images; 2) complex natural habitats often introduce strong ba…

Series B, Episode 06 - Trial
ZIL: To be alone must not be feared. The Host is slow to recognize one who is alone. Though there are many, all stay alone. [Clears off a patch of ground] Do you hunger? [Tears the ground open, scoops up some of the lining of the opening and eats it.] Do you hunger?
BLAKE: What is it?
https://

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Great to be out on the streets of Galway marching with comrades of all colours, creeds, and kinds standing against racism, discrimination, imperialism, and colonialism. A huge thanks to Galway Communities Against Racism and Discrimination for organising it. We have a world to win and that means standing up against discrimination and oppression and changing the system which facilitates it, Capitalism.
#Galway #antiracism #freepalestine

Pushing the Limits of Beam Search Decoding for Transducer-based ASR models
Lilit Grigoryan, Vladimir Bataev, Andrei Andrusenko, Hainan Xu, Vitaly Lavrukhin, Boris Ginsburg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00185

Pushing the Limits of Beam Search Decoding for Transducer-based ASR models
Transducer models have emerged as a promising choice for end-to-end ASR systems, offering a balanced trade-off between recognition accuracy, streaming capabilities, and inference speed in greedy decoding. However, beam search significantly slows down Transducers due to repeated evaluations of key network components, limiting practical applications. This paper introduces a universal method to accelerate beam search for Transducers, enabling the implementation of two optimized algorithms: ALSD++ …

Finished Hollow Fires by Samira Ahmed last night. It's gripping, sad, and fierce all at the same time. Explores themes of racism, Islamophobia, white supremacist terrorism, and police malcompetence in an extremely timely manner. It's a good book, which I'm extra happy about since I also liked Ahmed's This Book Won't Burn, so now I have another author whose work I'll be reading through.
Including Sabaa Tahir, Sabina Khan, and Adiba Jaigirdar, I've been reading a ton of great YA books by south Asian muslim authors recently, all discovered via the "grab something off the YA shelf by a probably-not-white author" method that has yet to fail me. Turns out the racism in publishing that puts a higher bar in front of authors of color at least makes it easy to find good books in one way >:(
#AmReading