Tootfinder

I’m so proud of my little brother.
I just spoke to him in his dorm room at a top 30 college here in the US, he just arrived for freshman orientation.
He got in on a full ride - tuition, housing, food, books, travel, stipend for daily expenses. Won a competitive scholarship to do so.
More than that, he’s had a tougher road than most to get there:
- he had to suddenly move away from Manila, Philippines (where he grew up) in middle school because of COVID restrictions that didn’t let kids go outside (2020)
- then, just as he adjusted to school and a different language in our home country, Ukraine, Russia invaded (2022)
- he stayed in Greece for a month while I was calling our congressional representative here in NY and negotiating with the US embassy to get them a visa ASAP to enter the US and be with me and my husband. There were no paths for Ukrainian refugees yet, we just wanted them with us temporarily for a few months to figure out what options they even had next.
- he had to wait, not going to school, with no clue where they’d move next, until TPS became available to Ukrainians and they got to stay here in the US
- then he had to continue high school in yet another system, yet another country, amidst news of bombings and destruction back home
- my mother wasn’t allowed to work for months while their documents were pending, so we had to raise money with a public GoFundMe campaign and my husband and I maxed out our credit cards to help them get by
- they shared a one-room cottage for the first year, graciously hosted for free by an elderly local couple
- he saw a therapist who also graciously took him in for free while they didn’t have insurance
- he had to graduate high school amidst news of other immigrant students getting arrested, detained, and deported at their own graduations around the country
- he wasn’t sure if he would even make it to college as this administration publicly considered canceling TPS for Ukrainians and cutting off their pathway to maintaining legal status.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds. But he’s there. He’s on campus. He got to go to college.
I love him so much.

Ireland’s Minister for justice, (who is about to spend the next year or so constantly saying things for media attention as he jockeys to remain top of mind in FF member’s heads) has also said he wants to break encryption (as soon as he finds out what it is. A kind of cupboard? A vase of some sort? A nut, perhaps, of Asian origin?)

Fabio Manganiello (@fabio@manganiello.social)
Another day, another Western country that clumsily tries to find legal ways to put backdoors in end-to-end encrypted services.In the case of the UK it’s allegedly to protect kids (the oldest excuse...

A gathering with reporters took place in the Oval Office last month
as Trump ordered a crackdown on “leftwing terrorism”
and threatened to investigate and prosecute those who financially support it.
“If you look at Soros, he’s at the top of everything,” the US president said.
There is no evidence linking George Soros,
a 95-year-old billionaire who has supported democratic causes around the world,
or Reid Hoffman,
who helped start PayPal and the netwo…

Last year I got a phone mount for my bike handlebars, and it came with 6 of these rubber grip things to attach your phone.
Well, I left it on my bike that's in the shop but I do have 5 extra rubber grippy things!
So I designed a quick & dirty phone holder that works with the bands so I can put a phone holder on many different bikes.
It attaches with two zip ties and I use a piece of cut up tube rubber wrapped around the bar beneath it for grip.

The Conjuring: Last Rites review: This was a mind-numbing corporate séance packaged as “horror.” Boring as hell.
Why tf do people bow down to this mass-produced ghost story machine? It's like, they summoned capitalism itself onto the screen, empty, repetitive, and designed to keep the herd lulled.
Sitting in that cinema felt like half my soul was on life-support. Horror’s supposed to rattle authority, not tuck you back into your consumer coma.
I found it awfully boring.…

@… is going down the same ugly road that already made kmail unusable. Playful OS devs adding fancy features. And while messing with the code, it starts eating your mail and stops to be reliable. It will end as a perfect frontend that is unreliable 😞 That was the initial reason I moved from kmail to TB. It is getting difficult to find something reliable in…

Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Bias
Shree Harsha Bokkahalli Satish, Harm Lameris, Olivier Perrotin, Gustav Eje Henter, \'Eva Sz\'ekely
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22061

Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Bias
Speech Continuation (SC) is the task of generating a coherent extension of a spoken prompt while preserving both semantic context and speaker identity. Because SC is constrained to a single audio stream, it offers a more direct setting for probing biases in speech foundation models than dialogue does. In this work we present the first systematic evaluation of bias in SC, investigating how gender and phonation type (breathy, creaky, end-creak) affect continuation behaviour. We evaluate three rec…