Tootfinder

Functional programming isn't just for Haskell developers. It's for #PHP developers, too. "Thinking Functionally in PHP" is available from LeanPub.
https://leanpub.com/thinking-functiona

Series D, Episode 07 - Assassin
PIRI: [Puzzled] What? Oh, yes, I suppose so. I'm sorry, I just can't stop thinking about that awful man at the end of the corridor.
NEBROX: Everything is going to be all right. We're all here to look after you. [Piri sobs] Would you - would you like me to go and take a look at him?
https://

Giants playfully troll Taylor Swift, Swifties and Chiefs with 'Lawrence Taylor cam'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/giants-playfully-troll…

So I'm thinking I want to get y'all some fresh photos for #caturday and not get them out of the file so I go looking for them in that house with the 90mm still on -- bigpaw was easy
#photo #photography

I can't help thinking that there's some sort of "Sexual Dynamo Georg" who's throwing off the numbers somewhere
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-number-of-sexual-partners-by-country

FlowForge: Guiding the Creation of Multi-agent Workflows with Design Space Visualization as a Thinking Scaffold
Pan Hao, Dongyeop Kang, Nicholas Hinds, Qianwen Wang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15559

FlowForge: Guiding the Creation of Multi-agent Workflows with Design Space Visualization as a Thinking Scaffold
Multi-agent workflows have become an effective strategy for tackling complicated tasks by decomposing them into multiple sub-tasks and assigning them to specialized agents. However, designing optimal workflows remains challenging due to the vast and intricate design space. Current practices rely heavily on the intuition and expertise of practitioners, often resulting in design fixation or an unstructured, time-consuming exploration of trial-and-error. To address these challenges, this work intr…

Still thinking about how @… told me that you can just email a couple of people to start a conversation with them about something. This was a couple of years ago I think, I haven't had the nerve to try it yet.

"Building a personal brand" is one of those incredibly cringe sounding things that's also legitimately good advice, especially in this job market. You just have to take a very different strategy from engagement-baiting.
Write for the kind of person you'll want to work with in the future, and those people will notice you. Write low-effort slop, and your audience will be completely useless to you when you need something from them.

Standing out through writing
Writing is thinking; writing in public is networking.

Thinking more about the PIC12F683 RE project.
I think if I really want to go all out, it might make sense to be both blog and video dual tracked, since some stuff will map better to one format or the other.
But that's gonna be a lot of work. Another option would be split media with particular parts of the analysis in one format or the other but not double covered.

From a story in today’s Wall Street Journal about Woody Allen and his new novel:

Though he’s already at work on a second novel, he rarely reads fiction—“I feel like I’m wasting time.”
More often he reads philosophy and books by physicists.
“I keep thinking I’m going to learn something of deep value that’s going to make me feel better in life,” he says.
“It never does.”

Two Number Theory Items (and Woody Allen)
James Douglas Boyd has recently spent a lot of time interacting with Mochizuki and others at RIMS working in anabelian geometry. Material from interviews he conducted are available here (Mochizuki …

Interaction as Intelligence: Deep Research With Human-AI Partnership
Lyumanshan Ye, Xiaojie Cai, Xinkai Wang, Junfei Wang, Xiangkun Hu, Jiadi Su, Yang Nan, Sihan Wang, Bohan Zhang, Xiaoze Fan, Jinbin Luo, Yuxiang Zheng, Tianze Xu, Dayuan Fu, Yunze Wu, Pengrui Lu, Zengzhi Wang, Yiwei Qin, Zhen Huang, Yan Ma, Zhulin Hu, Haoyang Zou, Tiantian Mi, Yixin Ye, Ethan Chern, Pengfei Liu

Interaction as Intelligence: Deep Research With Human-AI Partnership
This paper introduces "Interaction as Intelligence" research series, presenting a reconceptualization of human-AI relationships in deep research tasks. Traditional approaches treat interaction merely as an interface for accessing AI capabilities-a conduit between human intent and machine output. We propose that interaction itself constitutes a fundamental dimension of intelligence. As AI systems engage in extended thinking processes for research tasks, meaningful interaction transitions from an…

Finally getting around to playing with Typescript. Initial thoughts, I'm not sure how much value it really has over plain Javascript. I want to think it adds value, but I'm not sure that it does for the little i want to do with either. It "feels" better having types assigned, but the rare times I'm writing Javascript I'm thinking in types anyway and not really using libraries, plus always trying to go as minimal as possible. So I kind of doubt I'm catching many …

EduThink4AI: Translating Educational Critical Thinking into Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Xinmeng Hou, Zhouquan Lu, Wenli Chen, Hai Hu, Qing Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15015

EduThink4AI: Translating Educational Critical Thinking into Multi-Agent LLM Systems
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as educational tutoring agents, capable of tailoring hints, orchestrating lessons, and grading with near-human finesse across various academic domains. However, current LLM-based educational systems exhibit critical limitations in promoting genuine critical thinking, failing on over one-third of multi-hop questions with counterfactual premises, and remaining vulnerable to adversarial prompts that trigger biased or factually in…

Epstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB

Now two races left in 2010 #f1 rewatch, and still crazy to think Weber lost it.
Korean GP?? I don't remember that at all. Webber makes a very silly mistake towards the end of the wet race, goes wide, touches grass and spins, hitting another car and he is out. So I am thinking oh so Vettel will win this race. Nope, he has engine problem and can't finish it either.

Creative Intelligence is the only book that will give you the foundation, the ability for you to create your own floor. While others scramble to hit AI usage metrics and come up with bland ideas, you'll be building the skills and capabilities that actually matter and set you apart.
https://

Emphasizing Deliberation and Critical Thinking in an AI Hype World
Katja Rogers
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14961 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Emphasizing Deliberation and Critical Thinking in an AI Hype World
AI solutionism is accelerated and substantiated by hype and HCI's elevation of novelty. Banning or abandoning technology is unlikely to work and probably not beneficial on the whole either -- but slow(er), deliberate use together with conscientious, critical engagement and non-engagement may help us navigate a post-AI hype world while contributing to a solid knowledge foundation and reducing harmful impacts in education and research.

OpenAI debuts GPT‑5-Codex, a version of GPT‑5 optimized for agentic coding in Codex and says it spends its "thinking" time more dynamically than previous models (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/15/openai-upgrades-codex-wi…

OpenAI upgrades Codex with a new version of GPT-5 | TechCrunch
OpenAI's AI coding agent, Codex, can now spend anywhere from a few seconds to several hours on a task, thanks to a new, customized version of GPT-5.

So this got me thinking:
Starter primers:
Andor: Leftism/resistance
Barbie: Feminism
Matrix: Philosophy
Good Place: Ethics/Moral Philosophy
Sesame Street: Coexistence
Mr. Rogers: Empathy
Gillian’s Island: Capitalist Theory
https://youtu.be/rsRjQDrDnY8

I am thinking of asking my California state legislative reps to enact a law that would not recognize an Oklahoma driver's license until the applicant driver takes a test to demonstrate that he/she can distinguish up from down.
(Such tests would require payment of a non-refundable test fee of $100 and a mandatory three day study period, within the borders of California, to prepare for the test. Tests will be administered at one of three locations: Barstow, Alturas, or Morro Bay.)

Should we teach vibe coding? Here's why not.
Should AI coding be taught in undergrad CS education?
1/2
I teach undergraduate computer science labs, including for intro and more-advanced core courses. I don't publish (non-negligible) scholarly work in the area, but I've got years of craft expertise in course design, and I do follow the academic literature to some degree. In other words, In not the world's leading expert, but I have spent a lot of time thinking about course design, and consider myself competent at it, with plenty of direct experience in what knowledge & skills I can expect from students as they move through the curriculum.
I'm also strongly against most uses of what's called "AI" these days (specifically, generative deep neutral networks as supplied by our current cadre of techbro). There are a surprising number of completely orthogonal reasons to oppose the use of these systems, and a very limited number of reasonable exceptions (overcoming accessibility barriers is an example). On the grounds of environmental and digital-commons-pollution costs alone, using specifically the largest/newest models is unethical in most cases.
But as any good teacher should, I constantly question these evaluations, because I worry about the impact on my students should I eschew teaching relevant tech for bad reasons (and even for his reasons). I also want to make my reasoning clear to students, who should absolutely question me on this. That inspired me to ask a simple question: ignoring for one moment the ethical objections (which we shouldn't, of course; they're very stark), at what level in the CS major could I expect to teach a course about programming with AI assistance, and expect students to succeed at a more technically demanding final project than a course at the same level where students were banned from using AI? In other words, at what level would I expect students to actually benefit from AI coding "assistance?"
To be clear, I'm assuming that students aren't using AI in other aspects of coursework: the topic of using AI to "help you study" is a separate one (TL;DR it's gross value is not negative, but it's mostly not worth the harm to your metacognitive abilities, which AI-induced changes to the digital commons are making more important than ever).
So what's my answer to this question?
If I'm being incredibly optimistic, senior year. Slightly less optimistic, second year of a masters program. Realistic? Maybe never.
The interesting bit for you-the-reader is: why is this my answer? (Especially given that students would probably self-report significant gains at lower levels.) To start with, [this paper where experienced developers thought that AI assistance sped up their work on real tasks when in fact it slowed it down] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09089) is informative. There are a lot of differences in task between experienced devs solving real bugs and students working on a class project, but it's important to understand that we shouldn't have a baseline expectation that AI coding "assistants" will speed things up in the best of circumstances, and we shouldn't trust self-reports of productivity (or the AI hype machine in general).
Now we might imagine that coding assistants will be better at helping with a student project than at helping with fixing bugs in open-source software, since it's a much easier task. For many programming assignments that have a fixed answer, we know that many AI assistants can just spit out a solution based on prompting them with the problem description (there's another elephant in the room here to do with learning outcomes regardless of project success, but we'll ignore this over too, my focus here is on project complexity reach, not learning outcomes). My question is about more open-ended projects, not assignments with an expected answer. Here's a second study (by one of my colleagues) about novices using AI assistance for programming tasks. It showcases how difficult it is to use AI tools well, and some of these stumbling blocks that novices in particular face.
But what about intermediate students? Might there be some level where the AI is helpful because the task is still relatively simple and the students are good enough to handle it? The problem with this is that as task complexity increases, so does the likelihood of the AI generating (or copying) code that uses more complex constructs which a student doesn't understand. Let's say I have second year students writing interactive websites with JavaScript. Without a lot of care that those students don't know how to deploy, the AI is likely to suggest code that depends on several different frameworks, from React to JQuery, without actually setting up or including those frameworks, and of course three students would be way out of their depth trying to do that. This is a general problem: each programming class carefully limits the specific code frameworks and constructs it expects students to know based on the material it covers. There is no feasible way to limit an AI assistant to a fixed set of constructs or frameworks, using current designs. There are alternate designs where this would be possible (like AI search through adaptation from a controlled library of snippets) but those would be entirely different tools.
So what happens on a sizeable class project where the AI has dropped in buggy code, especially if it uses code constructs the students don't understand? Best case, they understand that they don't understand and re-prompt, or ask for help from an instructor or TA quickly who helps them get rid of the stuff they don't understand and re-prompt or manually add stuff they do. Average case: they waste several hours and/or sweep the bugs partly under the rug, resulting in a project with significant defects. Students in their second and even third years of a CS major still have a lot to learn about debugging, and usually have significant gaps in their knowledge of even their most comfortable programming language. I do think regardless of AI we as teachers need to get better at teaching debugging skills, but the knowledge gaps are inevitable because there's just too much to know. In Python, for example, the LLM is going to spit out yields, async functions, try/finally, maybe even something like a while/else, or with recent training data, the walrus operator. I can't expect even a fraction of 3rd year students who have worked with Python since their first year to know about all these things, and based on how students approach projects where they have studied all the relevant constructs but have forgotten some, I'm not optimistic seeing these things will magically become learning opportunities. Student projects are better off working with a limited subset of full programming languages that the students have actually learned, and using AI coding assistants as currently designed makes this impossible. Beyond that, even when the "assistant" just introduces bugs using syntax the students understand, even through their 4th year many students struggle to understand the operation of moderately complex code they've written themselves, let alone written by someone else. Having access to an AI that will confidently offer incorrect explanations for bugs will make this worse.
To be sure a small minority of students will be able to overcome these problems, but that minority is the group that has a good grasp of the fundamentals and has broadened their knowledge through self-study, which earlier AI-reliant classes would make less likely to happen. In any case, I care about the average student, since we already have plenty of stuff about our institutions that makes life easier for a favored few while being worse for the average student (note that our construction of that favored few as the "good" students is a large part of this problem).
To summarize: because AI assistants introduce excess code complexity and difficult-to-debug bugs, they'll slow down rather than speed up project progress for the average student on moderately complex projects. On a fixed deadline, they'll result in worse projects, or necessitate less ambitious project scoping to ensure adequate completion, and I expect this remains broadly true through 4-6 years of study in most programs (don't take this as an endorsement of AI "assistants" for masters students; we've ignored a lot of other problems along the way).
There's a related problem: solving open-ended project assignments well ultimately depends on deeply understanding the problem, and AI "assistants" allow students to put a lot of code in their file without spending much time thinking about the problem or building an understanding of it. This is awful for learning outcomes, but also bad for project success. Getting students to see the value of thinking deeply about a problem is a thorny pedagogical puzzle at the best of times, and allowing the use of AI "assistants" makes the problem much much worse. This is another area I hope to see (or even drive) pedagogical improvement in, for what it's worth.
1/2

Students' Perceptions to a Large Language Model's Generated Feedback and Scores of Argumentation Essays
Winter Allen, Anand Shanker, N. Sanjay Rebello
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14759

Students' Perceptions to a Large Language Model's Generated Feedback and Scores of Argumentation Essays
Students in introductory physics courses often rely on ineffective strategies, focusing on final answers rather than understanding underlying principles. Integrating scientific argumentation into problem-solving fosters critical thinking and links conceptual knowledge with practical application. By facilitating learners to articulate their scientific arguments for solving problems, and by providing real-time feedback on students' strategies, we aim to enable students to develop superior problem…

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model
NVIDIA, :, Aarti Basant, Abhijit Khairnar, Abhijit Paithankar, Abhinav Khattar, Adi Renduchintala, Adithya Renduchintala, Aditya Malte, Akhiad Bercovich, Akshay Hazare, Alejandra Rico, Aleksander Ficek, Alex Kondratenko, Alex Shaposhnikov, Ali Taghibakhshi, Amelia Barton, Ameya Sunil Mahabaleshwarkar, Amy Shen, Andrew Tao, Ann Guan, Anna Shors, Anubhav Mandarwal, Arham Mehta, Arun Venkatesan, As…

NVIDIA Nemotron Nano 2: An Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Reasoning Model
We introduce Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2, a hybrid Mamba-Transformer language model designed to increase throughput for reasoning workloads while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy compared to similarly-sized models. Nemotron-Nano-9B-v2 builds on the Nemotron-H architecture, in which the majority of the self-attention layers in the common Transformer architecture are replaced with Mamba-2 layers, to achieve improved inference speed when generating the long thinking traces needed for reasoning. We crea…

Samesies.
As I was with the Metaverse. As I will have been with "AI".
It's as if there was a pattern of people with domain experience valuing good solutions who call out bullshit tend to be right.
https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/115174150692070811

"The program totally backfired. People thought ELIZA was intelligent, they were confiding in the machine, revealing personal issues they would not tell anyone else. Even my secretary asked me to leave the room so she could be alone with the computer. They called me a genius for creating it, but I kept telling them that the computer was not thinking at all."
Oh, really, now, isn't that interesting, and so, of course, they reanimated it, because only a liberal socialist would call that a failure. 🤣
#posiwid #automatedgatheringofintel #agi

Sonnet 071 - LXXI
No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it, for I love you so,
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O! if, I say, you look upon this verse,
When I perhaps compounded am with …

I’m so tired of this big lot in the Mission sitting fenced and vacant in the midst of a housing crisis. For a while I thought vacancy tax, now I’m thinking eminent domain. Reportedly owned by an old lady in the Sunset who refuses to do anything with it.

CogDDN: A Cognitive Demand-Driven Navigation with Decision Optimization and Dual-Process Thinking
Yuehao Huang, Liang Liu, Shuangming Lei, Yukai Ma, Hao Su, Jianbiao Mei, Pengxiang Zhao, Yaqing Gu, Yong Liu, Jiajun Lv
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11334

CogDDN: A Cognitive Demand-Driven Navigation with Decision Optimization and Dual-Process Thinking
Mobile robots are increasingly required to navigate and interact within unknown and unstructured environments to meet human demands. Demand-driven navigation (DDN) enables robots to identify and locate objects based on implicit human intent, even when object locations are unknown. However, traditional data-driven DDN methods rely on pre-collected data for model training and decision-making, limiting their generalization capability in unseen scenarios. In this paper, we propose CogDDN, a VLM-bas…

“Move fast and break things.”
The things:
- Human rights
- Our habitat
- Democracy
#BigTech #SiliconValley #ventureCapital

What's the point of paying for an entry to a viewing platform, if there's a road bridge next to it, with the same height and roughly the same view?
Yeah, I know, it's the Poznań way of thinking.

I keep thinking about the depreciation curve on a Tesla vehicle and how a $100,000 car can now be purchased for sub $20,000.
Even at a great “value,” I just can’t trust Tesla not to screw over consumers with bait and switch and last-minute subscription fees.
I’d love to see an OSS vehicle operating system that folks can put into any EV.

@… I think it’s partially a question of motivation for me. Everyone around me speaks English, so learning German is… low on the list.
I hope to take more classes, and learn more, and eventually become proficient. But I think fluency, or thinking in German, is probably never going to happen for me.
I’m OK with that, most days. 🙃

If I wasn't already thinking of ditching #Windows for #Linux with the end of support for Win10, this would have decided me.
Bugs nobody can track because nobody can understand whatever the IA comes up with? On an operating system?
Hell no!

The latest large opensource AI model from China.
Kimi-K2
#AI #china #KimiK2

But, what makes me particularly proud and happy - with all the thinking over the last few days about what to do with Linux, returning to Fedora was never an issue! In the end, it was a decision between Debian and Arch, two distributions that couldn't be more different. But I opted for stability over up-to-dateness. Better safe than sorry.
#linux

This article is a good example of why I’m fed up with the “if used responsibly” argument:
https://thejournal.com/articles/2025/08/07/the-brain-drain-how-overreliance-on-ai-may-erode-creativity-and-critical-thin…

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Yi-Fan Zhang, Xingyu Lu, Shukang Yin, Chaoyou Fu, Wei Chen, Xiao Hu, Bin Wen, Kaiyu Jiang, Changyi Liu, Tianke Zhang, Haonan Fan, Kaibing Chen, Jiankang Chen, Haojie Ding, Kaiyu Tang, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11630

Thyme: Think Beyond Images
Following OpenAI's introduction of the ``thinking with images'' concept, recent efforts have explored stimulating the use of visual information in the reasoning process to enhance model performance in perception and reasoning tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, no open-source work currently offers a feature set as rich as proprietary models (O3), which can perform diverse image manipulations and simultaneously enhance logical reasoning capabilities through code. In this paper, we make…

Human brains are not computers, but thinking of mine as a system with wildly insufficient ram and a slow, buggy swap that's always freezing and needing a full reboot is explaining a lot for me right now. #adhd

There’s no doubting the seriousness with which Braxton approaches his art – this is a major composer, who with his Tri-Axium writings, has developed a musico-philosophical system of cosmic complexity – but the sense of adventure and fun he brings to these enterprises is undeniable. Braxton describes himself as "a professional student of music" and his enthusiasm for new ideas and possibilities is inspiring.

In a saner environment, we’d be having a reasonable conversation about that: in what ways, if any, can a machine that repeats contextual patterns with no sense of meaning augment humans thinking through tricky things? In ways can it mislead? When, if ever, is it worth the tradeoffs? the resource costs? etc etc.
Right now, the off-the-charts money and hype make that reasonable conversation impossible except perhaps in hushed corners. (Please do not have that argument in my replies. I am tired.)
7/

"Central to Fletcher’s thesis is the concept of 'story thinking.' This cognitive framework aligns closely with how humans have evolved to process information and communicate experiences. He posits that storytelling is [...] a fundamental cognitive tool that shapes our actions and decisions. The ability to conceptualize new narratives allows humans to forge paths toward success, whether by escaping predators or devising innovative strategies in modern contexts".

While this is completely anecdotal, I always imagined that this is what being a billionaire or CEO is like. Everyone kisses your ass, tells you that you're brilliant, are afraid to critique or correct you.. and you basically lose touch with reality. You start thinking you are some kind of superior person when in reality you're a dumbass just like the rest of us - you just happen to have more money/power.

So, the whole WeTransfer content ownership thing... Am I correct in thinking that 6.2 and 6.3 are completely at odds with each other?
#WeTransfer

Despite the country's financial straits, this is a wonderful time to be a technologist in government, according to Paul Mukherjee, CTO of the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2025/ai/g

Government CTO: 'I had a lightbulb moment with agentic AI'
Defra’s CTO believes AI may help government thinking move from processes to outcomes, while agents could assist in complex technical tasks like cloud migrations.

Jerry Jones reveals Dallas Cowboys' Micah Parsons trade offer reaction with Eagles https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/jerry-jones-reveals-dallas-cowboys-micah-parsons-trade-offer-reaction-with-eagles

Apparently DHH announced he’s moving to Linux; no big surprise there as there’s a sizable fraction of right-wing users of it (somewhere in the “rational-thinking, free speech, meritocracy & libertarian with a sprinkle of pseudoscience” oeuvre).
Something the Linux community has never managed to effectively deal with.

Progress on the #tricycle project is mainly in thinking about and working on the subframe. One thing that I'm sure is the right decision is to give the subframe a flat mounting flange, which will bolt down onto a matching pedestal within the hull. This will make the subframe easier to fabricate, and easier to mount/dismount - which I think will be needed for any work on the wheel or tyre.

The audacity of expecting others to spend their valuable time with content you put out there but never spent any real time thinking on.

Mind the Ethics! The Overlooked Ethical Dimensions of GenAI in Software Modeling Education
Shalini Chakraborty, Lola Burgue\~no, Nathalie Moreno, Javier Troya, Paula Mu\~noz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13896

Mind the Ethics! The Overlooked Ethical Dimensions of GenAI in Software Modeling Education
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is rapidly gaining momentum in software modeling education, embraced by both students and educators. As GenAI assists with interpreting requirements, formalizing models, and translating students' mental models into structured notations, it increasingly shapes core learning outcomes such as domain comprehension, diagrammatic thinking, and modeling fluency without clear ethical oversight or pedagogical guidelines. Yet, the ethical implications of this in…

More Total Recall (1990) now after midnight. I do little bits here and there. Some weird ultraviolence before sleep. Maybe it's strange that this is a big comfort movie of mine, but it definitely is. Was thinking about it a lot Thursday, so it's time.

Collaborative Preferences for Learning Mathematics: A Scale Validation Study
Sang Hyun Kim, Tanya Evans
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12199 https://arxiv.org/…

Collaborative Preferences for Learning Mathematics: A Scale Validation Study
Collaboration within mathematics has been established as being effective in providing students with crucial opportunities to develop critical thinking, effective communication, and teamwork skills. By engaging in group problem-solving and shared learning experiences, students may gain deeper insights into mathematical concepts and learn to approach challenges from multiple perspectives. However, there remains a need for a reliable instrument to capture students' preferences for collaboration. T…

Deep Thinking With Dr. Steven Stolz
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: #GreatAusPods

I thought I would get an orange pro, but now I am thinking “Miguel you are a stylish person, you need the air” but a voice inside me says “you need as many camera lenses as Apple can put in there”
The next 35 hours will be packed with anxiety.

You and me both, dude.
Excerpt from "A Talk with Philip Glass," Musicworks : No. 13 (Fall 1980), https://www.canadiana.ca/view/mw.00001_13/9

Recently I’ve been thinking about taking a step back from my friendship with my mom, maybe just talking to her less.
Sometimes I honestly wonder if I’m just misinterpreting things, but it really seems like she’s uncomfortable with me being fucking queer, especially with me hanging around other queer people at my local gay bar. She’ll question who I’m with and lately it feels like she’s always picking at my life choices. I can’t tell if it’s just me being sensitive, or if she’s actually…

I went down a rabbit hole trying to understand some health issues, and I ended up with an idea for a study that involves Espresso and heart disease risks that would be relatively easy to perform and could help make more informed health decisions. My journey (and this is only one tiny aspect, I've been thinking about this a lot) started a bit more than a year ago when I got a blood test as part of a health checkup that contained some concerning values, notably high glucose and high LDL. 🧵…

Two of the families in Gaza that I’m in touch with are thinking of setting up a group fundraising effort, inspired by the work of @….
We need someone who will take on the huge responsibility of setting up the fundraiser and managing it all.
If you have the time and are up for the challenge, please reply to this thread (direct messages are fine).

go ahead, keep ignoring my music posts. it only makes my references More Obscure
on that note, Deerhoof's Offend Maggie flows so much better with the vinyl track order. I don't know what they were thinking with the CD track order, it's so cooked

Hey! Just a quick snap from today's walk (okay about 4:30h) near #kirchseeon and #ebersberg.
It's been warm but really beautiful. A lot of shade, quite some old trees, lots of green 😊
I'm curious how the photos will turn out. - Now I'm thinking about tomorrow's a…

🪞 Beyond the field: New research highlights how name, image and likeness is reshaping college athlete identity
https://phys.org/news/2025-07-field-highlights-image-reshaping-college.html

Beyond the field: New research highlights how name, image and likeness is reshaping college athlete identity
In an era of name, image and likeness, or NIL, many college athletes are thinking differently about who they are—seeing themselves not just as competitors or students, but also as influencers with distinct voices and causes, according to a new study from the University of Florida.

Are there any established easily electrical connectors that can be 3D printed cheaply (like, <0.10€ each)? I'm thinking of 0.3mm bare copper wire threaded through the parts and making contact with each other backed by plastic springs, but designing them from scratch would take many iterations.
Ideally, I'd like to make connections in up to 10 places, each with 4 pins, from a single FDM part, wire them to a single small PCB (3 bus pins plus one per place) for <1€ in parts.…

This article is a good example of why I’m fed up with the “if used responsibly” argument:
https://thejournal.com/articles/2025/08/07/the-brain-drain-how-overreliance-on-ai-may-erode-creativity-and-critical-thin…

This article is a good example of why I’m fed up with the “if used responsibly” argument:
https://thejournal.com/articles/2025/08/07/the-brain-drain-how-overreliance-on-ai-may-erode-creativity-and-critical-thin…

Re-thinking Memory-Bound Limitations in CGRAs
Xiangfeng Liu, Zhe Jiang, Anzhen Zhu, Xiaomeng Han, Mingsong Lyu, Qingxu Deng, Nan Guan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09570 https://…

Re-thinking Memory-Bound Limitations in CGRAs
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRAs) are specialized accelerators commonly employed to boost performance in workloads with iterative structures. Existing research typically focuses on compiler or architecture optimizations aimed at improving CGRA performance, energy efficiency, flexibility, and area utilization, under the idealistic assumption that kernels can access all data from Scratchpad Memory (SPM). However, certain complex workloads-particularly in fields like graph analytics, ir…

Free advice: When something Not Great happens that's relevant to Black folks or Jewish or queer or Arabic folks, such as hate crimes or laws restricting civil rights…
…please check in with your friends and colleagues who might be emotionally affected even if they're not directly connected
Sharing kind sentiments is as easy as "I heard about some recent events. You don't have to say anything, but I'm thinking about you and I care about your well-being ❤️"…

Conflect: Designing Reflective Thinking-Based Contextual Privacy Policy for Mobile Applications
Shuning Zhang, Sixing Tao, Eve He, Yuting Yang, Ying Ma, Ailei Wang, Xin Yi, Hewu Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12578

Conflect: Designing Reflective Thinking-Based Contextual Privacy Policy for Mobile Applications
Privacy policies are lengthy and complex, leading to user neglect. While contextual privacy policies (CPPs) present information at the point of risk, they may lack engagement and disrupt tasks. We propose Conflect, an interactive CPP for mobile apps, guided by a reflective thinking framework. Through three workshops with experienced designers and researchers, we constructed the design space of reflective thinking-based CPP design, and identified the disconnect between context and action as the …

We have to fight with everything we have against the awful "Chat Control" proposal. It is very easy to explain why it is a very bad idea but because the subject is child abuse, everybody loses rational thinking capabilities it seems. https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-contr…

Chat Control: The EU's CSAM scanner proposal
🇫🇷 French: Traduction du dossier Chat Control 2.0 🇸🇪 Swedish: Chat Control 2.0🇳🇱 Dutch: Chatcontrole The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence Take action to stop Chat Control now! The Chat Control 2.0 proposal in detail Changes proposed by the European Parliament

> DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”
The "screaming all the time" part is really common for people in government tech, albeit internal.

The Untold Saga Of What Happened When DOGE Stormed Social Security
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, L…

Gen AI in Proof-based Math Courses: A Pilot Study
Hannah Klawa, Shraddha Rajpal, Cigole Thomas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13570 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.…

Gen AI in Proof-based Math Courses: A Pilot Study
With the rapid rise of generative AI in higher education and the unreliability of current AI detection tools, developing policies that encourage student learning and critical thinking has become increasingly important. This study examines student use and perceptions of generative AI across three proof-based undergraduate mathematics courses: a first-semester abstract algebra course, a topology course and a second-semester abstract algebra course. In each case, course policy permitted some use o…

Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models
Arushi Goel, Sreyan Ghosh, Jaehyeon Kim, Sonal Kumar, Zhifeng Kong, Sang-gil Lee, Chao-Han Huck Yang, Ramani Duraiswami, Dinesh Manocha, Rafael Valle, Bryan Catanzaro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08128…

Audio Flamingo 3: Advancing Audio Intelligence with Fully Open Large Audio Language Models
We present Audio Flamingo 3 (AF3), a fully open state-of-the-art (SOTA) large audio-language model that advances reasoning and understanding across speech, sound, and music. AF3 introduces: (i) AF-Whisper, a unified audio encoder trained using a novel strategy for joint representation learning across all 3 modalities of speech, sound, and music; (ii) flexible, on-demand thinking, allowing the model to do chain-of-thought-type reasoning before answering; (iii) multi-turn, multi-audio chat; (iv) …

at public records in #brooklyn, dreamy/loopy chamber #jazz for a summer's eve in bitchin' quad sound by johnson/wilkes/uhlmann, which (i kept thinking) would probably get somewhat lost if played outdoors on a summer's eve. perhaps the best room for pure listening in

“They're illusions, Michael. A trick is what whores do for money.”
"The future of work isn’t “prompt engineering.” It’s thinking in public, out loud, with the robots. The better you get at that, the further you’ll distance yourself from the Gob Bluths at work still performing illusions."

TIL that Microsoft Copilot is now trying to show a "face" with different "emotions". That it's not working right now is not my issue. That MS are even more explicitly trying to trick people into thinking they are having a conversation with an actual person, however, most definitely *is*.
Did this "feature" run through an ethics board review? Is the additional emotional deception of users intentional? Who actually wants that sh..?
I am getting ha…

Tom Warren (@tomwarren.co.uk)
I finally got access to the Copilot Appearance feature and Microsoft's AI assistant really doesn't wanna show off its facial expressions

AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity
Yifan Liu, Wenkuan Zhao, Shanshan Zhong, Jinghui Qin, Mingfu Liang, Zhongzhan Huang, Wushao Wen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14171

AssoCiAm: A Benchmark for Evaluating Association Thinking while Circumventing Ambiguity
Recent advancements in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have garnered significant attention, offering a promising pathway toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). Among the essential capabilities required for AGI, creativity has emerged as a critical trait for MLLMs, with association serving as its foundation. Association reflects a model' s ability to think creatively, making it vital to evaluate and understand. While several frameworks have been proposed to assess associative abi…

Does anyone have experience with Spaceship (#Spaceship.

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

I know there's way too many moto vloggers already, but I've been playing around with grabbing video of my rides for a while and I'm thinking about starting to share them online. One of the blockers was definitely in helmet audio. I've tried various lapel mics, either with a separate USB adaptor or just built as a USB-C mic, and always have the same problem. The audio signal is just too hot, and the constant clipping makes it unusable. I'm happy to say that the DJI mic min…

OpenAI introduces "Auto", "Fast", and "Thinking" settings for GPT-5 in ChatGPT's model picker, with "Auto" similar to the GPT-5 model router announced earlier (Maxwell Zeff/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/12/chat

ChatGPT's model picker is back, and it's complicated | TechCrunch
GPT-5 was supposed to get rid of all the complicated AI models to choose from in ChatGPT, but that's not how it's panned out.

I just had a video conversation on Signal with Nouran (@…) and her brother Yousef from Gaza.
Their family is one of countless ones in Palestine who are still alive but unsure of what tomorrow is going to bring. Last night was especially tough with Israel’s renewed bombing. Yousef told me that at least they are still in their own home and that …

Urgent help for Ahmed's family
"I’m tired, Mama. I’m thinking of the hours that I'll spend tomorrow in the water line." – says 9 year old Ahmed to his mother before going to sleep.

So, here's where we're at:
Trump said Thursday that he’s thinking of staging a UFC match on the White House grounds with upwards 20,000 spectators to celebrate 250 years of American independence.
“We have a lot of land there,” said Trump, a UFC enthusiast who has attended several of its mixed martial arts matches in recent months and is close friends with Dana White, the league’s president.
Trump announced his plan in Iowa during the kickoff for a year’s worth of fest…

Trump wants a UFC fight at the White House
President Donald Trump wants to celebrate 250 years of American independence with a UFC match at the White House. Trump announced the plan Thursday in Iowa during the kickoff event for a year of festivities leading up to that milestone birthday on July 4, 2026. The White House UFC fight would be one of many events held across the country. Trump is a UFC enthusiast who has attended several matches in recent months. The Republican president also announced an athletic competition for high school s…

Having designed a good-enough CAD model of the subframe for my #tricycle as a welded aluminium structure, I'm now thinking that it might be better constructed as carbon fibre laid up over an XPS polystyrene armature.
The benefits are that I can do composites myself, whereas I can't weld aluminium; and that the composite would probably be both stronger and lighter. The downside is th…

Summary of today's dreams:
1. I changed my shorts but forgot to replace the paper towels in my pockets. I wouldn't have thought my brain would treat this as such a #nightmare. I mean, lack of paper towels, not fresh shorts. The terror when you put your hand in the pocket, and it's empty.
2. I forgot to put my garbage out last night. It was around 7 AM (having precise dreams is important), it was raining and I was hurrying to put them out, worrying it's too late already. Then, I've discovered there's a huge dumpster in front of my gate, filled to the brim with loose cat litter. And I was thinking, the garbage company won't take such a tonnage of loose litter like that.
#dream

Can We Predict Alignment Before Models Finish Thinking? Towards Monitoring Misaligned Reasoning Models
Yik Siu Chan, Zheng-Xin Yong, Stephen H. Bach
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12428

Can We Predict Alignment Before Models Finish Thinking? Towards Monitoring Misaligned Reasoning Models
Open-weights reasoning language models generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) before producing a final response, which improves performance but introduces additional alignment risks, with harmful content often appearing in both the CoTs and the final outputs. In this work, we investigate if we can use CoTs to predict final response misalignment. We evaluate a range of monitoring approaches, including humans, highly-capable large language models, and text classifiers, using either CoT text or ac…

Replaced article(s) found for cs.CV. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CV/new
[3/5]:
- GLM-4.1V-Thinking and GLM-4.5V: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcemen...
V Team, et al.

GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT is shockingly good at search and demonstrates the potential of combining tool calling with chain-of-thought reasoning (Simon Willison/Simon Willison's Weblog)
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/research-goblin/

GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT (aka Research Goblin) is shockingly good at search
“Don’t use chatbots as search engines” was great advice for several years... until it wasn’t. I wrote about how good OpenAI’s o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back …

FlexMind: Scaffolding Flexible Ideation Workflows with AI in Creative Problem-Solving
Yaqing Yang, Vikram Mohanty, Nikolas Martelaro, Aniket Kittur, Yan-Ying Chen, Matthew K. Hong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12408

FlexMind: Scaffolding Flexible Ideation Workflows with AI in Creative Problem-Solving
Divergent thinking in the ideation stage of creative problem-solving demands that individuals explore a broad design space. Yet this exploration rarely follows a neat, linear sequence; problem-solvers constantly shift among searching, creating, and evaluating ideas. Existing interfaces either impose rigid, step-by-step workflows or permit unguided free-form exploration. To strike a balance between flexibility and guidance for augmenting people's efficiency and creativity, we introduce a human-A…

RepoForge: Training a SOTA Fast-thinking SWE Agent with an End-to-End Data Curation Pipeline Synergizing SFT and RL at Scale
Zhilong Chen, Chengzong Zhao, Boyuan Chen, Dayi Lin, Yihao Chen, Arthur Leung, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Gustavo A. Oliva, Ahmed E. Hassan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01550

RepoForge: Training a SOTA Fast-thinking SWE Agent with an End-to-End Data Curation Pipeline Synergizing SFT and RL at Scale
Training software engineering (SWE) LLMs is bottlenecked by expensive infrastructure, inefficient evaluation pipelines, scarce training data, and costly quality control. We present RepoForge, an autonomous, end-to-end pipeline that generates, evaluates, and trains SWE agents at scale. Our key contributions include: (1) RepoForge-8B-Agent, achieving 17.4\% on SWE-Bench-Verified~\citep{swebench_verified2024}, establishing new state-of-the-art for $\leq$8B non-thinking LLMs; (2) 7,304 executable e…

Certainty-Guided Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Dynamic Thinking Budget Approach
Jo\~ao Paulo Nogueira, Wentao Sun, Alonso Silva, Laith Zumot
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07820

Certainty-Guided Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Dynamic Thinking Budget Approach
The rise of large reasoning language models (LRLMs) has unlocked new potential for solving complex tasks. These models operate with a thinking budget, that is, a predefined number of reasoning tokens used to arrive at a solution. We propose a novel approach, inspired by the generator/discriminator framework in generative adversarial networks, in which a critic model periodically probes its own reasoning to assess whether it has reached a confident conclusion. If not, reasoning continues until a…

Octopuses possess a radically decentralized nervous system,
with the majority of their neurons residing in their arms.
Some say the octopus is a single organism with 9 brains.
From another perspective, we can say it is nine organisms housed within a single skin.
How can multiple humans come to inhabit a single organism with distributed sensory and decision-making capabilities?
How is cognition located in the network that spans bodies and environments?

How to Become an Octopus (and sometimes squid) — Gray Area Festival 2025 Workshop
What might we learn by thinking, sensing, and moving like an cephalopod? In this embodied, experimental workshop, artist Miriam Simun invites participants to leave behind the habits of upright human life and explore the world from the perspective of the soft-bodied, many-armed cephalopod.

I am thinking about the discussion Trump will have with Qatar, "yes, sorry but you needed to be bombed and ofcourse we really want to keep the large US military base in your country..." 😂 , if Qatar just lets this go they will lose all credibility.
#qatar #usa

Thinking Inside the Mask: In-Place Prompting in Diffusion LLMs
Xiangqi Jin, Yuxuan Wang, Yifeng Gao, Zichen Wen, Biqing Qi, Dongrui Liu, Linfeng Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10736

Thinking Inside the Mask: In-Place Prompting in Diffusion LLMs
Despite large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, their prefix-only prompting paradigm and sequential generation process offer limited flexibility for bidirectional information. Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) present new opportunities through their bidirectional attention mechanisms and iterative refinement processes, enabling more flexible in-place prompting strategies. We introduce ICE (In-Place Chain-of-Thought Prompting with Early Exit), a novel framework that …

Thinking with Nothinking Calibration: A New In-Context Learning Paradigm in Reasoning Large Language Models
Haotian Wu, Bo Xu, Yao Shu, Menglin Yang, Chengwei Qin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03363

Thinking with Nothinking Calibration: A New In-Context Learning Paradigm in Reasoning Large Language Models
Reasoning large language models (RLLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities through structured and multi-step reasoning. While prior research has primarily focused on improving their training and inference strategies, their potential for in-context learning (ICL) remains largely underexplored. To fill this gap, we propose Thinking with Nothinking Calibration (JointThinking), a new ICL paradigm that leverages the structured difference between two reasoning modes, i.e., Thinking an…

GPT-5's system card says gpt-5-thinking has a hallucination rate of 4.5% with browsing enabled, compared to gpt-5-main's 9.6%, GPT-4o's 12.9%, and o3's 12.7% (Cecily Mauran/Mashable)
https://mashable.com/article/openai-gpt-5-hallucinates-less-syst…

OpenAI says GPT-5 hallucinates less — what does the data say?
Web access is key here.

Sources: Mira Murati has told investors Thinking Machines Lab plans to develop customized AI models based on business KPIs, and also plans a consumer product (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/ex-openai-cto-m…

How Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s Startup Plans to Compete With OpenAI and Others
The thinking behind Thinking Machines Lab, a high-profile but mysterious artificial intelligence startup led by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, is becoming clearer. After raising an astonishing $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz ...

RTQA : Recursive Thinking for Complex Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models
Zhaoyan Gong, Juan Li, Zhiqiang Liu, Lei Liang, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03995

RTQA : Recursive Thinking for Complex Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models
Current temporal knowledge graph question answering (TKGQA) methods primarily focus on implicit temporal constraints, lacking the capability of handling more complex temporal queries, and struggle with limited reasoning abilities and error propagation in decomposition frameworks. We propose RTQA, a novel framework to address these challenges by enhancing reasoning over TKGs without requiring training. Following recursive thinking, RTQA recursively decomposes questions into sub-problems, solves …

GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models
5 Team, Aohan Zeng, Xin Lv, Qinkai Zheng, Zhenyu Hou, Bin Chen, Chengxing Xie, Cunxiang Wang, Da Yin, Hao Zeng, Jiajie Zhang, Kedong Wang, Lucen Zhong, Mingdao Liu, Rui Lu, Shulin Cao, Xiaohan Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Yao Wei, Yean Cheng, Yifan An, Yilin Niu, Yuanhao Wen, Yushi Bai, Zhengxiao Du, Zihan Wang, Zilin Zhu, Bohan Zhang, Bosi Wen, Bowen Wu, Bowen Xu, Can Huang, Casey Zhao, Changpeng Cai, Chao Yu, Chen Li, Chendi …

GLM-4.5: Agentic, Reasoning, and Coding (ARC) Foundation Models
We present GLM-4.5, an open-source Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language model with 355B total parameters and 32B activated parameters, featuring a hybrid reasoning method that supports both thinking and direct response modes. Through multi-stage training on 23T tokens and comprehensive post-training with expert model iteration and reinforcement learning, GLM-4.5 achieves strong performance across agentic, reasoning, and coding (ARC) tasks, scoring 70.1% on TAU-Bench, 91.0% on AIME 24, and 64…