Tootfinder

DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm US Citizenship - Slashdot
https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/01/1736221/dhs-says-real-id-which-dhs-certifies-is-too-unreliable-to-confirm-us-citizenship

Does #cloudflare have issues again? Currently #linkedin return a 500 on all requests with "cloudflare" ind the message. The same for orangeamps.com which I know uses cloudflare from the last cloudflare issues.
Maybe people should stop using such an unreliable service.

Symbol Timing Synchronization and Signal Detection for Ambient Backscatter Communication
Yuxin Li, Guangyue Lu, Yinghui Ye, Zehui Xiong, Liqin Shi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02981

Symbol Timing Synchronization and Signal Detection for Ambient Backscatter Communication
Ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) enables ambient Internet of Things (AIoT) devices to achieve ultra-low-power, low-cost, and massive connectivity. Most existing AmBC studies assume ideal synchronization between the backscatter device (BD) and the backscatter receiver (BR). However, in practice, symbol timing offset (STO) occurs due to both the propagation delay and the BR activation latency, which leads to unreliable symbol recovery at the BR. Moreover, the uncontrollable nature of the …

Flamed-TTS: Flow Matching Attention-Free Models for Efficient Generating and Dynamic Pacing Zero-shot Text-to-Speech
Hieu-Nghia Huynh-Nguyen, Huynh Nguyen Dang, Ngoc-Son Nguyen, Van Nguyen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02848

Flamed-TTS: Flow Matching Attention-Free Models for Efficient Generating and Dynamic Pacing Zero-shot Text-to-Speech
Zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) has recently advanced significantly, enabling models to synthesize speech from text using short, limited-context prompts. These prompts serve as voice exemplars, allowing the model to mimic speaker identity, prosody, and other traits without extensive speaker-specific data. Although recent approaches incorporating language models, diffusion, and flow matching have proven their effectiveness in zero-shot TTS, they still encounter challenges such as unreliable synth…

Tell Congress: NO Funding for Primate Breeding! #AnimalRights

URGENT: Tell Congress NO to Funding Primate Breeding!
Right now, Congress is working on the 2025 federal budget, and the Senate Appropriations Committee has allocated a staggering $30 million to expand primate breeding and research at National Primate Research Centers. This funding will support invasive, unethical experiments on primates—causing unimaginable suffering while advancing unreliable science that fails over 90% of the time in human clinical trials. 🔬 Despite these facts, the NIH asked for $10 million, but the Senate has tripled th…

Meanwhile on the #Sun as seen by SDO HMI https://jsoc1.stanford.edu/data/hmi/images/latest/HMI_latest_Int_4096x4096.gif at 21:53 UTC today ... the big groups (1)4296 and 4294 at the bottom as well as 4299 at the top keep marching towards the center of the disk, but not much has happened since the X1.9 flare two days ago. (The Kp forecast in https://www.spacepager.eu/data-products/forecast-of-the-kp-index sees something interesting three nights from now, though, but such long-term views are notoriously unreliable.)

OF COURSE!
LLMs do not have any knowledge They only have words. When "introspecting" they are actually just word-salading that like they do everything else. They can't SAY that so they make up plausible-seeming explanations.
BECAUSE THAT IS ALL THEY DO, EVER. https://mastodon.social/@arstechni…

Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image LLMs show a “highly unreliable” capacity to describe their own internal processes Anthropic finds some LLM "self-awareness," but "failures of introspection remain the norm." https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/llms-show-a-highly-unreliable-capacity-to-describe-their-own-internal-processes/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

:oleander_hawkmoth:
i am very unreliable. it is my curse. i say fuck the reliable. i am so unreliable i can't even be relied on to be unreliable 🌊
#randomcrap

oh no
Don’t use AI to tell you how to vote in election, says Dutch watchdog
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/oct/21/ai-chatbots-unreliable-biased-advice-voters-dutch-watchdog

For decades, some big polluters were allowed to estimate their emissions using methods the government knew were often unreliable.

Real Pollution Levels: Air monitors at coke manufacturers, chemical plants and other industrial facilities showed far higher emissions than the estimates, records viewed by ProPublica show.

Trump Halts New Rules: The Trump administration has halted rules requiring more than 130 industrial plants to install air monitors and comply with new e…

The EPA Let Companies Estimate Their Own Pollution Levels. We Discovered Real Emissions Are Far Worse.
The Trump administration has put a stop to EPA rules that would have required more than 130 industrial facilities to install air monitors to measure pollution. Millions of people living near these plants face an increased risk of cancer.

💢 Unreliable public charging stations deter many potential electric vehicle buyers
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-09-unreliable-stations-deter-potential-electric.html

Unreliable public charging stations deter many potential electric vehicle buyers
Public electric vehicle charging stations in America have a bad reputation. They're notorious for breaking down, charging at a snail's pace, refusing customer payment and leaving drivers stranded without juice.

#TIL
> The macros describing this structure live in <asm/ioctl.h> and are
> _IO(type,nr) and {_IOR,_IOW,_IOWR}(type,nr,size). They use
> sizeof(size) so that size is a misnomer here: this third argument
> is a data type.
>
> Note that the size bits are very unreliable: in lots of cases they
> are wrong, either because of buggy macros using
> sizeof(sizeof(struct)), or because of legacy values.
#Linux

From my perspective ->
1. So much construction. It is almost impossible to go anywhere without lane closures.
2. Buses are less than reliable and the last update nuked one route I took and it leaves me one and only one route to the transfer point near work.
3. LRT construction. Going to work isn't too bad, getting home I have to travel AWAY from home, transfer and hope the bus going home arrives. Alternative is to take three buses and that is double the time than …

So essentially whatever happens during the meeting between Trump and Zelensky it's probably all theatrics and will mean nothing, even if Trump promises security guarantuees (unlikely). Because recent history has shown Trump is totally unreliable and can change opinion in a day...
#Trump #Zelensky

Tree companies are really unreliable, even for a quote. It's been weeks since a tree fell and none seem to want to take my money.

A look at Opera's Neon, a $20-per-month agentic AI browser that can take over browsing tasks, but its three built-in AI chatbots can be confusing and unreliable (The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/801899/opera-neon-ai-browser-trial-run

Opera’s Neon shows just how confusing AI browsers still are
Opera’s Neon browser has three AI agents and a $20 per month subscription attached.

AHA! #docker #nginx #mac Success!
After much logging and inspecting and reconfiguring you know what worked? (It's what always works!). Turning it off and on…
It's just a matter of turning the *right* thing off and on.
In this case, it was a matter of rebooting the webcam itself, which I really should have known because it has been unreliable at accepting new settings without a full reboot in the past. Weird that it was making the connection to NGINX but not actually sending data on that connection. The reboot of the webcam appears to have forced the data to be sent to the new proper docker address and on to Youtube.
Unfortunately I tried changing the stream key for Youtube before trying the webcam reboot which creates a new youtube URL, so I'll have to update my YouTube embed codes but oh well, it is worth having success with docker!
I feel much more comfortable working with docker now and understand the build/run workflow more now so I can start customizing my Dockerfile and be confident that I’m not going to miss anything.
Now I should be able to redirect all of my streams off of #footiMac and onto the slightly newer #imac2014 OR... most importantly, anywhere I have this docker container!
Woot!
Thank you everyone who gave tips and pointers along the way.
#learning #askmastodon
stream: https://www.youtube.com/live/WpbMTI9D6hI

The main reasons for me to use Safari on macOS despite being behind on web standards is integration with its iOS siblings and performance.
However: bookmark sync is unreliable and relatedly reading list is so janky too that I switched to GoodLinks. And somehow the UI gets increasingly sluggish until I restart it like an old Windows system.
I guess it's time for an experiment.

Last week, while the country reacted to Kennedy’s rewrite of vaccine reality,
Jay Bhattacharya continued his own campaign to rewrite pandemic history.
He did this by retweeting misleading content from an unreliable source.
A closer look at that source, and at Bhattacharya’s long-standing relationship with it, raises serious concerns for science-based public health.

HHS Science Is Rotting From the Head
How RFK Jr and Jay Bhattacharya Are Undermining Science at HHS

'Don’t argue with strangers… and 11 more rules to survive the information crisis' https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/nov/15/dont-argue-with-strangers-and-11-more-rules-to-survive-the-information-cris…

I see that with a lot of criticism of generative "AI"—people state that obviously it's completely unreliable and untrustworthy for _their domain of expertise_ but they'll somehow gladly use it for other stuff.
I believe this cognitive dissonance has to do with how the chatbots pretend to be humans and trick us to assume agency when there is none.
Anyway, as I said otherwise it's great, you should read it: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Reports of Russia advances in Ukraine are really describing the advance of Chinese drones on fiber optic cable.
The Russian infantry remains incompetent and unreliable, even though it outnumbers Ukraine in troops and ammo.
Ukraine needs ammo. Same story since the beginning of the war.
Giorgio is on the ground, dodging drones in order to provide updates from the front lines, where US reporters never venture.
He shares the friend link to bypass the paywall, so the world…

Russian Troops Are Not Advancing On The Ground. Technology Is.
Nightmare Days and Nights in Kramatorsk

Konstantin Ryabitsev, an admin of kernel.org infrastructure, reported on increasing difficulties they are having with SMTP deliveries.
"major hosts are increasingly not interested in getting mail from anyone who isn't also a major mail service provider"
"With lore and public-inbox, we *are* in the process of moving away from
relying on the increasingly unreliable SMTP layer"

From a Buddhist perspective, telling highly unreliable stories about ourselves is something we do daily; in doing so self-consciously, literary auto-fashioners enact the realization of this fact.

One other thing, while we don't claim that our mixed-effects logit model is the perfect way to account for non-independence between languages, we don't think it's correct, as Xia & Lindell assert, to just claim that our results are "counterintuitive", the fix-eff estimates are "unreliable" and that the high model fits are "unrealistic." Whether a mix model better captures the data-generat. process is ultimately an empirical question, not one to be decided by assertion. Take, for instance, our finding that once random effects for either subregion or language family are included, the estimated effect of L1_population reverses direction—from the negative value reported by Xia & Lindell et al. to a positive one.

Assessing Policy Updates: Toward Trust-Preserving Intelligent User Interfaces
Matan Solomon, Ofra Amir, Omer Ben-Porat
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10616 https://

Assessing Policy Updates: Toward Trust-Preserving Intelligent User Interfaces
Reinforcement learning agents are often updated with human feedback, yet such updates can be unreliable: reward misspecification, preference conflicts, or limited data may leave policies unchanged or even worse. Because policies are difficult to interpret directly, users face the challenge of deciding whether an update has truly helped. We propose that assessing model updates -- not just a single model -- is a critical design challenge for intelligent user interfaces. In a controlled study, par…

Google Pixel Watch 4 review: a significant leap in Google's smartwatch lineup with a nice domed display, but Gemini is unreliable, and GPS maps are still wonky (Victoria Song/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/tech/795383/google-pixel-…

The Google Pixel Watch 4 is the Android watch to beat
The $349.99 Google Pixel Watch 4 adds several smart updates that add up to the best Android smartwatch you can buy.

ChoirRec: Semantic User Grouping via LLMs for Conversion Rate Prediction of Low-Activity Users
Dakai Zhai, Jiong Gao, Boya Du, Junwei Xu, Qijie Shen, Jialin Zhu, Yuning Jiang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09393

ChoirRec: Semantic User Grouping via LLMs for Conversion Rate Prediction of Low-Activity Users
Accurately predicting conversion rates (CVR) for low-activity users remains a fundamental challenge in large-scale e-commerce recommender systems.Existing approaches face three critical limitations: (i) reliance on noisy and unreliable behavioral signals; (ii) insufficient user-level information due to the lack of diverse interaction data; and (iii) a systemic training bias toward high-activity users that overshadows the needs of low-activity users.To address these challenges, we propose ChoirR…

Quantile-Scaled Bayesian Optimization Using Rank-Only Feedback
Tunde Fahd Egunjobi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03277 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03277…

Quantile-Scaled Bayesian Optimization Using Rank-Only Feedback
Bayesian Optimization (BO) is widely used for optimizing expensive black-box functions, particularly in hyperparameter tuning. However, standard BO assumes access to precise objective values, which may be unavailable, noisy, or unreliable in real-world settings where only relative or rank-based feedback can be obtained. In this study, we propose Quantile-Scaled Bayesian Optimization (QS-BO), a principled rank-based optimization framework. QS-BO converts ranks into heteroscedastic Gaussian targe…

Dynamic Control Aware Semantic Communication Enabled Image Transmission for Lunar Landing
Fangzhou Zhao, Yao Sun, Jianglin Lan, Muhammad Ali Imran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06916

Dynamic Control Aware Semantic Communication Enabled Image Transmission for Lunar Landing
The primary challenge in autonomous lunar landing missions lies in the unreliable local control system, which has limited capacity to handle high-dynamic conditions, severely affecting landing precision and safety. Recent advancements in lunar satellite communication make it possible to establish a wireless link between lunar orbit satellites and the lunar lander. This enables satellites to run high-performance autonomous landing algorithms, improving landing accuracy while reducing the lander'…

Domain-Shift-Aware Conformal Prediction for Large Language Models
Zhexiao Lin, Yuanyuan Li, Neeraj Sarna, Yuanyuan Gao, Michael von Gablenz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05566 http…

Domain-Shift-Aware Conformal Prediction for Large Language Models
Large language models have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks. However, their tendency to produce overconfident and factually incorrect outputs, known as hallucinations, poses risks in real world applications. Conformal prediction provides finite-sample, distribution-free coverage guarantees, but standard conformal prediction breaks down under domain shift, often leading to under-coverage and unreliable prediction sets. We propose a new framework called Domain-Shift-Aware Conf…

DRACO: Data Replication and Collection Framework for Enhanced Data Availability and Robustness in IoT Networks
Waleed Bin Qaim, Oznur Ozkasap, Rabia Qadar, Moncef Gabbouj
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.07464

DRACO: Data Replication and Collection Framework for Enhanced Data Availability and Robustness in IoT Networks
The Internet of Things (IoT) bridges the gap between the physical and digital worlds, enabling seamless interaction with real-world objects via the Internet. However, IoT systems face significant challenges in ensuring efficient data generation, collection, and management, particularly due to the resource-constrained and unreliable nature of connected devices, which can lead to data loss. This paper presents DRACO (Data Replication and Collection), a framework that integrates a distributed hop-…

Home assistant is too unreliable. I run it on the Raspberry Pi4B with an external HDD for storage and every now and then it just stops responding or does not boot after an update or does not update or ... Sometimes a restart helps, sometimes I need to reinstall and get everything from the backup. Now today I ran into the "missing shutdown button":
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/shutdown-option-removed/715359/15 Such a diva. I'm done with home assistant for now.
https://machteburch.social/@tomkalei/114523359245193309
P.S. Switching back to RetroPie on that machine.