Tootfinder

Google confirms hackers stole Salesforce-stored data from 200 companies via a supply chain hack involving Gainsight, which provides a customer support platform (Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/21/goog

Google says hackers stole data from 200 companies following Gainsight breach | TechCrunch
Notorious hacking collective Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters takes credit for the breach that affected Salesforce customers’ data, and said it is planning another extortion campaign.

Navigating 10-foot flames,
he arrived at the crashed
cyber truck.
But the bulletproof door,
opened electronically by a hidden push button,
wouldn’t budge.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2025/cyb…

How the Cybertruck's design may have trapped crash survivors in flames
In at least a dozen cases since 2019, people have struggled to access or exit Teslas during life-threatening emergencies, fueling lawsuits alleging the company’s futuristic features have caused injuries and deaths.

"A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. [...] In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers."
"Unlike this mental outsourc…

AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity
Despite a surge in generative AI use across workplaces, most companies are seeing little measurable ROI. One possible reason is because AI tools are being used to produce “workslop”—content that appears polished but lacks real substance, offloading cognitive labor onto coworkers. Research from BetterUp Labs and Stanford found that 41% of workers have encountered such AI-generated output, costing nearly two hours of rework per instance and creating downstream productivity, trust, and colla…

Its good to have many tests in your R package, but it can be a pain to debug some failing tests when it happens. {lazytest} for the rescue: only rerun the failing tests, until they pass: #RStats

ComposableNav: Instruction-Following Navigation in Dynamic Environments via Composable Diffusion
Zichao Hu, Chen Tang, Michael J. Munje, Yifeng Zhu, Alex Liu, Shuijing Liu, Garrett Warnell, Peter Stone, Joydeep Biswas
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17941

ComposableNav: Instruction-Following Navigation in Dynamic Environments via Composable Diffusion
This paper considers the problem of enabling robots to navigate dynamic environments while following instructions. The challenge lies in the combinatorial nature of instruction specifications: each instruction can include multiple specifications, and the number of possible specification combinations grows exponentially as the robot's skill set expands. For example, "overtake the pedestrian while staying on the right side of the road" consists of two specifications: "overtake the pedestrian" and…

Thinking about giving to folk in #Gaza; quite complicated feelings. Firstly, we do *have* to give, and give personally, because conventional charities are not effectively getting relief to Gaza -- presumably because they are being blocked by #Israel -- and because our governments are doing nothing.
Bu…

Filings: Meta spent the most on US lobbying in Q3, spending $5.8M, followed by Amazon, Google, Apple; Anthropic, Nvidia, and a16z hit $1M for the first time (Ashley Gold/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/21/tech-lobbying-insights-q3

Meta tops spending again as AI lobbying heats up
Big Tech companies are still outspending companies focusing purely on AI and hardware.

Silicon Integrated Photonic Waveguide Polarizers with 2D MoS2 Films
Junkai Hu, Jiayang Wu, Irfan H. Abidi, Di Jin, Yuning Zhang, Jianfeng Mao, Anchal Pandey, Yijun Wang, Sumeet Walia, David J. Moss
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17295

Silicon Integrated Photonic Waveguide Polarizers with 2D MoS2 Films
Polarization control is of fundamental importance for modern optical systems, and optical polarizers serve as critical components for enabling this functionality. Here, we experimentally demonstrate optical polarizers by integrating 2D molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) films onto silicon photonic waveguides. High-quality monolayer MoS2 films with highly anisotropic light absorption are synthesized via a low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) method and subsequently transferred onto silicon-on…

In the latest defense filing,
Luigi Mangione's lawyers claim
Pam Bondi was a partner at the lobbying firm
Ballard Partners
before she became attorney general,
and the company lists UnitedHealth Group (UHG) as a client.
As a result,
Bondi derives and continues to receive personal and financial benefits from Ballard
"in the form of a profit-sharing plan from Ballard's professional association with UHG,"
according to cour…

Luigi Mangione Says Pam Bondi Has Financial Ties to Murder Victim's Company
Luigi Mangione says he now knows the real reason why Attorney General Pam Bondi is seeking the death penalty against him ... she allegedly has deep ties to the murder victim's health care company.

Sequoia, a16z, and other VC firms invested $1.2B into police and public safety tech startups over the past year, following the success of Palantir and others (Abram Brown/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/a

Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Add to $1.2 Billion Funding Boom for Police Tech Startups
Over the past year, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and many of Silicon Valley’s other top venture capital firms have funneled at least $1.2 billion in funding to startups selling technology to city police departments and local public safety agencies. Those companies illustrate the technology industry’s growing enthusiasm for making software and hardware for the government and law