Tootfinder

Before earlier this year, I had a Ford Ranger sitting in my driveway that I used three or four times per year. I ordered collector plates for it (since I don't drive it in the winter anyways and I don't want to have to pay to renew plates) and then my sister's car broke down (while she's still owed money on it) so I gave the truck to her. I hadn't even received the collector plates yet. I found out today that she's driving around with the collector plates on it.

TFRank: Think-Free Reasoning Enables Practical Pointwise LLM Ranking
Yongqi Fan, Xiaoyang Chen, Dezhi Ye, Jie Liu, Haijin Liang, Jin Ma, Ben He, Yingfei Sun, Tong Ruan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09539 …

TFRank: Think-Free Reasoning Enables Practical Pointwise LLM Ranking
Reasoning-intensive ranking models built on Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress, but existing approaches often rely on large-scale LLMs and explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, resulting in high computational cost and latency that limit real-world use. To address this, we propose \textbf{TFRank}, an efficient pointwise reasoning ranker based on small-scale LLMs. To improve ranking performance, TFRank effectively integrates CoT data, fine-grained score supervision, and …

Thanks to everyone involved for an amazing #NixCon2025 ! As my first #NixCon, I'm happy to have finally met so many familiar names I only knew from collaborating online, like Philip Taron, @…

Free-running vs. Synchronous: Single-Photon Lidar for High-flux 3D Imaging
Ruangrawee Kitichotkul, Shashwath Bharadwaj, Joshua Rapp, Yanting Ma, Alexander Mehta, Vivek K Goyal
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09386

Free-running vs. Synchronous: Single-Photon Lidar for High-flux 3D Imaging
Conventional wisdom suggests that single-photon lidar (SPL) should operate in low-light conditions to minimize dead-time effects. Many methods have been developed to mitigate these effects in synchronous SPL systems. However, solutions for free-running SPL remain limited despite the advantage of reduced histogram distortion from dead times. To improve the accuracy of free-running SPL, we propose a computationally efficient joint maximum likelihood estimator of the signal flux, the background fl…

A small poster under the bell tower of St Peter's, Marefair, Northampton. #cycling #churchbells #BellRinging

Turn of events this evening:
- wanted to try out @…
- v1.3.4 doesn't seem to have a #macOS binary in the release but release notes mention that 1.3.4 includes upstreamed fixes from MacPorts
- look at the

I don't think that "give beginners LLMs to get them started so they can actually learn to do it later" checks out.
(Original title: But will they?)
https://tante.cc/2025/07/21/but-will-they/

But will they?
Armin Ronacher, who is quite a well-known open source developer (especially in the Python community) and who would probably consider himself a very rational, pragmatic person when it comes to “AI” usage posted an interesting post on Mastodon today: Post by @mitsuhiko View on Mastodon So his thought is that giving especially younger, less experienced […]

Are completely arbitrary minimum page / word count criteria still a thing in school and academia?
As a person that likes to get to the point quickly, I always fell short of these artificial requirements and yet it never affected my grades, because I said everything there is to say.
In times of LLMs, I do wonder how many students feel pressured to reach for ChatGPT just because their natural way of writing does not conform to excessive prose expectations.

Initiator of the #NixOS documentation team is stepping down:
https://discourse.nixos.org/t/the-next-chapter-in-nix-documentation/68425

So #Rustlings apparently is a rather hard term for speech to text to recognize unguided. Terms I got instead, while correcting subtitles for our meetup talk:
- Rustlinks
- Rustlinfs
- Wrestling (my favorite)
"Because I think it'd be really great to have some sort of guided wrestling in my company."
Also, "Rust for Rustaceans" became "…