Hey everyone, hope this is okay to post here. My co-author and I are currently between institutional affiliations, which means we don't have the academic email arXiv needs for an endorsement. We're hoping to find someone in cs.CV willing to take a quick look at our paper and endorse it if it meets your bar. The project: Locate-SAM2 We built a training-free pipeline connecting NVIDIA's LocateAnything-3B to Meta's SAM 2.1 through a lightweight adapter. The question we wanted to answer was simple: in a modular text-to-mask pipeline where everything is frozen, does the choice of grounder actually matter for the final mask? A few specifics, since the details are what tell you we're not just generating noise: On RefCOCO val, our system reaches 0.772 mIoU versus 0.717 for Grounding DINO Base, using the same SAM 2.1 backend throughout. RefCOCO appears in LocateAnything's training data, so we frame this honestly as in-domain benchmarking, not zero-shot transfer. We're not pretending otherwise. The paper has controlled comparisons across RefCOCO/+/g, adapter ablations, a ground-truth box oracle, a failure taxonomy, and a nonsense-prompt probe showing the pipeline needs abstention logic. Code is on GitHub and the paper is close to submission-ready. What we're hoping for Mainly an endorsement: someone to read the draft and, if they think it holds up, endorse us on arXiv. We'd acknowledge it and that's the whole ask. If anyone wants to get more involved, we're open to expanding the experiments or pointing the paper at a specific venue, and we'd talk co-authorship based on real contribution. We also have separate work in progress in physically-constrained DL, geospatial AI, and AI governance, in case any of that overlaps with what you do. We're not looking for a blind voucher. Drop a comment or a DM and we'll share the PDF and the repo. Happy to answer questions, and thanks for reading. submitted by /u/j_root_ [link] [Kommentare]

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I thought of a cute problem: what is the smallest (size) ./a.out binary I can create? Here are some rules the program should follow: ./a.out must run successfully. $? must deterministically be 0. The binary must be produced by GCC only; no post-processing with objcopy, hex editors, or manual patching. We begin with the simplest program possible: // compiled with gcc empty.c int main() { return 0; } This gives us a file size of 15816 bytes (from stat). Not too shabby, but we will need four of the RAM used in the Apollo guidance computer to fit our binary that does nothing.

Don't get your hopes up.

We have 50,000 registered participants in SSoC 2026. Three hundred projects. Five thousand mentors. The most impactful engineering work we did this season? A hidden admin dashboard that no participant will ever see.

You have seen the posts. The LinkedIn announcement that opens "In a world where", four hundred words long and not one of them the author's. The comment that thanks you for "this incredibly thoughtful piece" and then describes a piece you did not write. The company email so completely handed over to a machine, start to finish, that no human could have read it back without wincing, which is the tell, because plainly no human did. Bad work is not the part that gets to me. Bad work has always been with us. It is that nobody making it appears to feel a thing. Not a wince, not a flicker.