Tootfinder

The National Institutes of Health is responsible for more than 80% of the world’s grant investment in biomedical research.
Its funding has sparked countless medical breakthroughs
— on cancer, diabetes, strokes
— and plays a fundamental role in the development of pharmaceutical drugs.
Scientists compete vigorously for a slice of the more than $30 billion that the agency doles out annually;
they can spend years assembling grant applications that stretch thousand…

Science Shattered
The Trump administration cut research funding that sought cures for future pandemics, examined the causes of dementia and tried to prevent HIV transmission. More than 150 researchers shared with ProPublica what is being lost.

CeeDee Lamb's epic response to drop issues should please Cowboys fans https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/ceedee-lamb-epic-response-drop-issues-should-please-dallas-cowboys-fans

Trump's Dangerous Response to the Kirk Assassination (Jonathan Chait/The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/kirk-assassination-trump-response/684175/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250911/p54#a250911p54

Communication-Learning Co-Design for Differentially Private Over-the-Air Federated Distillation
Zihao Hu (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Jia Yan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), Ying-Jun Angela Zhang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06557 …

Communication-Learning Co-Design for Differentially Private Over-the-Air Federated Distillation
The ever-growing learning model size nowadays challenges the communication efficiency and privacy preservation of the traditional federated learning (FL). In this paper, we propose a novel differentially private (DP) over-the-air federated distillation (FD) framework, where wireless devices (WDs) periodically share noise-perturbed model outputs with the parameter server by harnessing the superposition property of multi-access channels. Accordingly, over-the-air FD enables the shared responsibil…

White House official confirms that the federal takeover of DC police department is expected to be in effect for 30 days
but added that this would be ‘subject to change’

Trump vows to ‘clean up’ DC crime
-- despite sharp drop in violence

Subtooting since people in the original thread wanted it to be over, but selfishly tagging @… and @… whose opinions I value...
I think that saying "we are not a supply chain" is exactly what open-source maintainers should be doing right now in response to "open source supply chain security" threads.
I can't claim to be an expert and don't maintain any important FOSS stuff, but I do release almost all of my code under open licenses, and I do use many open source libraries, and I have felt the pain of needing to replace an unmaintained library.
There's a certain small-to-mid-scale class of program, including many open-source libraries, which can be built/maintained by a single person, and which to my mind best operate on a "snake growth" model: incremental changes/fixes, punctuated by periodic "skin-shedding" phases where make rewrites or version updates happen. These projects aren't immortal either: as the whole tech landscape around them changes, they become unnecessary and/or people lose interest, so they go unmaintained and eventually break. Each time one of their dependencies breaks (or has a skin-shedding moment) there's a higher probability that they break or shed too, as maintenance needs shoot up at these junctures. Unless you're a company trying to make money from a single long-lived app, it's actually okay that software churns like this, and if you're a company trying to make money, your priorities absolutely should not factor into any decisions people making FOSS software make: we're trying (and to a huge extent succeeding) to make a better world (and/or just have fun with our own hobbies share that fun with others) that leaves behind the corrosive & planet-destroying plague which is capitalism, and you're trying to personally enrich yourself by embracing that plague. The fact that capitalism is *evil* is not an incidental thing in this discussion.
To make an imperfect analogy, imagine that the peasants of some domain have set up a really-free-market, where they provide each other with free stuff to help each other survive, sometimes doing some barter perhaps but mostly just everyone bringing their surplus. Now imagine the lord of the domain, who is the source of these peasants' immiseration, goes to this market secretly & takes some berries, which he uses as one ingredient in delicious tarts that he then sells for profit. But then the berry-bringer stops showing up to the free market, or starts bringing a different kind of fruit, or even ends up bringing rotten berries by accident. And the lord complains "I have a supply chain problem!" Like, fuck off dude! Your problem is that you *didn't* want to build a supply chain and instead thought you would build your profit-focused business in other people's free stuff. If you were paying the berry-picker, you'd have a supply chain problem, but you weren't, so you really have an "I want more free stuff" problem when you can't be arsed to give away your own stuff for free.
There can be all sorts of problems in the really-free-market, like maybe not enough people bring socks, so the peasants who can't afford socks are going barefoot, and having foot problems, and the peasants put their heads together and see if they can convince someone to start bringing socks, and maybe they can't and things are a bit sad, but the really-free-market was never supposed to solve everyone's problems 100% when they're all still being squeezed dry by their taxes: until they are able to get free of the lord & start building a lovely anarchist society, the really-free-market is a best-effort kind of deal that aims to make things better, and sometimes will fall short. When it becomes the main way goods in society are distributed, and when the people who contribute aren't constantly drained by the feudal yoke, at that point the availability of particular goods is a real problem that needs to be solved, but at that point, it's also much easier to solve. And at *no* point does someone coming into the market to take stuff only to turn around and sell it deserve anything from the market or those contributing to it. They are not a supply chain. They're trying to help each other out, but even then they're doing so freely and without obligation. They might discuss amongst themselves how to better coordinate their mutual aid, but they're not going to end up forcing anyone to bring anything or even expecting that a certain person contribute a certain amount, since the whole point is that the thing is voluntary & free, and they've all got changing life circumstances that affect their contributions. Celebrate whatever shows up at the market, express your desire for things that would be useful, but don't impose a burden on anyone else to bring a specific thing, because otherwise it's fair for them to oppose such a burden on you, and now you two are doing your own barter thing that's outside the parameters of the really-free-market.

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
Yuto Mandai, Katie Seaborn, Tomoyasu Nakano, Xin Sun, Yijia Wang, Jun Kato
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06235

Super Kawaii Vocalics: Amplifying the "Cute" Factor in Computer Voice
"Kawaii" is the Japanese concept of cute, which carries sociocultural connotations related to social identities and emotional responses. Yet, virtually all work to date has focused on the visual side of kawaii, including in studies of computer agents and social robots. In pursuit of formalizing the new science of kawaii vocalics, we explored what elements of voice relate to kawaii and how they might be manipulated, manually and automatically. We conducted a four-phase study (grand N = 512) with…

Color-Blind Image Sensors: Towards Digital Twin of Human Retina
Yushan Meng, Bryce Widdicombe, Dechuan Sun, Paul Beckett, Peter van Wijngaarden, Efstratios Skafidas, Ampalavanapillai Nirmalathas, Ranjith Unnithan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08518

Color-Blind Image Sensors: Towards Digital Twin of Human Retina
The human retina contains a complex arrangement of photoreceptors that convert light into visual information. Conventional image sensors mimic the trichromacy of the retina using periodic filter mosaics responsive to three primary colors. However, this is, at best, an approximation, as an actual retina exhibits a quasi-random spatial distribution of light-sensitive rod and cone photoreceptors, where the ratio of rods to cones and their concentrations vary across the retina. Hence, the periodic …

More Joutnalists killed in #Gaza by #Israel
#AlJazeera said the attack “is a desperate attempt to silence voices in anticipation of the occupation of Gaza.”

When Competition Helps: Achieving Optimal Traffic Flow with Multiple Autonomous Planners
Ivan Geffner, Erez Karpas, Moshe Tennenholtz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07145 https://…

When Competition Helps: Achieving Optimal Traffic Flow with Multiple Autonomous Planners
The inefficiency of selfish routing in congested networks is a classical problem in algorithmic game theory, often captured by the Price of Anarchy (i.e., the ratio between the social cost of decentralized decisions and that of a centrally optimized solution.) With the advent of autonomous vehicles, capable of receiving and executing centrally assigned routes, it is natural to ask whether their deployment can eliminate this inefficiency. At first glance, a central authority could simply compute…