Tootfinder

https://karlgroves.com/how-much-should-you-spend-on-accessibility/
“… a good rule of thumb is to treat accessibility as a core part of your compliance strategy. Aiming for 5%–10% of your compliance budget is a solid starting point. For some, that may mean 0.1%–0…

#Censorship of agency research continues, see the latest at the EPA. This assault endanger all of us--make calls, write letters, talk to people you know! https://defendresearch.org

If you've been paying attention, this is a *very* strong signal that OpenAI is hitting the limits of improved capability with more compute/data and they're (predictably) all out of other ideas. The quiet "exponential model capabilities" lie here is what Altmann promised but is now starting not to be able to deliver, even in cherry-picked demo terms.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/sam-altman-says-agi-is-a-pointless-term-experts-agree.html
The "agentic" turn was never going to pan out, because it exposes the unreliability of LLMs too directly, and it turns out that no amount of yelling at your text vending machine to "Be smarter! Think harder!" will actually get you anything more than vended text.
I'm *praying* that we get into this crash sooner rather than later, since the faster it comes, the less painful it will be.
My recent reading in actual research papers corroborates this, for example, asking LLMs to play games exposes their utter lack of anything that can be termed "reasoning":
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08501v1

i guess i have skills

It's so funny what tech people think ordinary computer users can "just" do.
"Just go into your BIOS and enable TPM!"
"Just buy and install a TPM module on your motherboard!"
"Just research and select the best Linux distro for you!"

Your Breath Controls Your Vision: New Research Reveals Surprising Connection https://techfixated.com/your-breath-controls-your-vision-new-research-reveals-surprising-connection-3…

Your Breath Controls Your Vision: New Research Reveals Surprising Connection
Every inhale and exhale subtly reshapes what you see—a discovery that could transform how we understand perception, attention, and even diagnose neurological

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

The trouble with being Harvard is that your name is the most valuable thing you own. It’s bigger than anything the institution actually does.
Yes, there are some amazing and excellent people at Harvard — and some utter dingbats, as anywhere else — but whatever actual excellence Harvard offers in education or research is secondary. Harvard is a •brand• first and foremost. It’s a name people put on their resumes to make themselves worth more money in capitalism’s eyes.
1/ https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:36n7wd7gg4tapamnog4zyyc6/post/3m2r4uuijyc2r

OpenAI launches ChatGPT Pulse, a mobile feature for Pro users that delivers daily personalized updates based on their chats, feedback, and connected apps (Hayden Field/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-int

OpenAI really, really wants you to start your day with ChatGPT Pulse
ChatGPT’s new Pulse feature does personalized research on your behalf overnight and serves you up a digest each morning.

From a Q2 (according to Elsevier Scopus ) journal asking for a review. They are not even trying. According to them, I have an "expertise in areas related to linguistics (if any)" [I love this "if any"!] , makes me "an ideal candidate to review the manuscript".

What your brain activity says about you: A review of neuropsychiatric disorders identified in resting-state and sleep EEG data
J. E. M. Scanlon, A. Pelzer, M. Gharleghi, K. C. Fuhrmeister, T. K\"ollmer, P. Aichroth, R. G\"oder, C. Hansen, K. I. Wolf
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04984

What your brain activity says about you: A review of neuropsychiatric disorders identified in resting-state and sleep EEG data
Electroencephalogram monitoring devices and online data repositories hold large amounts of data from individuals participating in research and medical studies without direct reference to personal identifiers. This paper explores what types of personal and health information have been detected and classified within task-free EEG data. Additionally, we investigate key characteristics of the collected resting-state and sleep data, in order to determine the privacy risks involved with openly availa…

Your Model Is Unfair, Are You Even Aware? Inverse Relationship Between Comprehension and Trust in Explainability Visualizations of Biased ML Models
Zhanna Kaufman, Madeline Endres, Cindy Xiong Bearfield, Yuriy Brun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00140

Your Model Is Unfair, Are You Even Aware? Inverse Relationship Between Comprehension and Trust in Explainability Visualizations of Biased ML Models
Systems relying on ML have become ubiquitous, but so has biased behavior within them. Research shows that bias significantly affects stakeholders' trust in systems and how they use them. Further, stakeholders of different backgrounds view and trust the same systems differently. Thus, how ML models' behavior is explained plays a key role in comprehension and trust. We survey explainability visualizations, creating a taxonomy of design characteristics. We conduct user studies to evaluate five sta…

🧪 Were you one of the many thousands of STEM students and mentors impacted by the sudden change in #NSF #GRFP eligibility last week?
We created a petition to NSF leadership and Congress to reverse the changes— please sign and share your stories here, and spread the word to other affected folks

One for the scientists:
You should only use tools and processes on your data that you completely understand.
LLMs are—by design—black boxes being trained to create algorithms that are so complex that it is strictly impossible to understand them.
Therefore they are incompatible with handling data (such transforming data or generating synthetic data) for scientific research.

Would you let a humanoid play storytelling with your child? A usability study on LLM-powered narrative Humanoid-Robot Interaction
Maria Lombardi, Carmela Calabrese, Davide Ghiglino, Caterina Foglino, Davide De Tommaso, Giulia Da Lisca, Lorenzo Natale, Agnieszka Wykowska
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02505…

Would you let a humanoid play storytelling with your child? A usability study on LLM-powered narrative Humanoid-Robot Interaction
A key challenge in human-robot interaction research lies in developing robotic systems that can effectively perceive and interpret social cues, facilitating natural and adaptive interactions. In this work, we present a novel framework for enhancing the attention of the iCub humanoid robot by integrating advanced perceptual abilities to recognise social cues, understand surroundings through generative models, such as ChatGPT, and respond with contextually appropriate social behaviour. Specifical…

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

Dr. Kamila Naxerova is trying to understand how cancer spreads in the body.
Dr. Rachael Sirianni is trying to find new ways to deliver drugs for childhood brain cancer.
Dr. David Ho is trying to make breakthroughs in H.I.V. research.
These researchers and so many others worked to ensure that Americans had access to the best medical treatments available
and that they had first access to those treatments.
That is, they worked until Trump administration gutted fun…

Opinion | Trump Is Defunding Medical Research. It Could Cost You Your Life.
They hoped to make tomorrow’s medicines. Then came Trump.

What if you could skip the most boring parts of your research? 🤔
I spent the last week testing the SciSpace AI Agent, and it's honestly wild. This feels like the future for students and researchers. I documented the whole thing so you can see it in action.
🎥 https://youtu.be/5hS28-f2Vgk
✨ I …

"AI companies, which are depending more and more on synthetic data as they rapidly run out of material that was human-made and not polluted by AI drivel" - so, you knew there were problems, and released it to the public anyway (slow clap). And news-flash, because you released it to the public, even some of your "human-made" data is now polluted by AI drivel in the first place.

"Kindly share the appropriate contact person or email address for your security team, along with any details regarding a bug bounty program or incentives for reporting vulnerabilities, as this effort has required considerable time and resources."
kindly research whether there is a bug bounty and optionally ask if unsure before putting in considerable time and effort without being asked, you fucking jackass.

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

@… Thought you might like this
https://oldbytes.space/@gloriouscow/114874406309915115

Join a research study on disaster preparedness and deaf people.
#deafness #Deaf #disaster #DisasterPreparedness

I feel that I might have some decent experiece and research around Iems to at least make a simple article about them, its been a bit as I have been busy with work, but I now have the time to do so. You may see it on your feed in augest :blobcatrainbow: