Tootfinder

Chipmaker Cerebras Systems raised a $1.1B Series G from Fidelity, Trump Jr.'s 1789 Capital, and others at an $8.1B post-money valuation ahead of its planned IPO (Rebecca Szkutak/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/30/a-year-…

A year after filing to IPO, still-private Cerebras Systems raises $1.1B | TechCrunch
Cerebras initially filed to go public in September 2024 but ran into several regulatory delays due to foreign investments.

1/2 In a piece about Canadian politics, probably not of interest to outsiders, I suspect this will amuse many:
“Trump’s [team] are every bit the … “Bad Boy” Detroit Pistons of the late 80s … Trump is peak Bill Laimbeer, sneering and fouling everything in sight. JD Vance is Dennis Rodman, an Energizer bunny clearing the boards. And Stephen Miller is Isaiah Thomas, the floor general weaving through defences and chirping at his opponents with an insouciant mug begging to be slapped.”

Okay, here's the promised follow-up with more authors I respect who didn't make it onto this list. I won't do deep dives but I'll list at least one work per author:
YA novelists:
- Randi Pink ("Girls Like Us")
- Louisa Onomé ("Twice as Perfect")
- Emery Lee ("Meet Cute Diary")
- Robin Benway ("Far from the Tree")
- Angela Velez ("Lulu and Milagro's Search for Clarity")
Children's book authors:
- Jacqueline Davies ("Bubbles Up")
- Freya Hartas ("Slow Down in the Park")
Novelists:
- Rimma Onoseta ("How You Grow Wings")
Graphic novelists:
- Linda Medley ("Castle Waiting")
- 🖋️Magsalene Visaggio 🖌️Paulina Ganucheau ("Girlmode")
- Ursula Vernon ("Digger")
- SJ Sindu ("Tall Water" w/ Dion MBD)
- Hope Larson ("Be That Way"; "Salt Magic" w/ Rebecca Mock)
- Lily Williams Karen Schneemann ("Go With the Flow")
- Maia Kobabe ("Gender Queer")
- Kay O'Neill ("Tea Dragon Society")
- Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis")
Mangaka:
- Kaoru Mori ("Young Bride's Stories")
- Ryoko Kui ("Delicious in Dungeon")
- Natsuki Takaya ("Fruits Basket")
Anime writers/directors and/or Japanese light/fantasy/SF novelists:
- Nahoko Uehashi ("Moribito")
- Sayo Yamamoto ("Michiko & Hatchin"; "Yuri!!! On Ice")
- Mari Okada ("Ano Hana: The Flower we Saw That Day"; "Toradora!")
Game designers/programmers:
(Upon review I was pretty remiss in skipping over a few of these people, some of whom I wasn't aware of but most of whom I just didn't remember when writing my short list. Subconscious misogyny in action. Short & Thorson probably would have squeezed out some of the YA authors I included, although I have no real regrets.)
- Junko Kawano ("Suikoden")
- Elizabeth LaPensée ("When Rivers Were Trails")
- Momo Pixel ("Hair Nah")
- Zoë Quinn ("Depression Quest"; narrative designer on "Solar Ash")
- Kellee Santiago ("Cloud"; "Flower")
- Tanya X. Short ("Moon Hunters")
- Kim Swift ("Portal")
- Maddy Thorson ("Celeste")
- Andi McClure @… ("Jumpman")
Note: I haven't included composers or artists here, but there's a deep bench.
Games journalists/steamers:
- Tanya DePass @… (#/INeedDiverseGames; twitch streams)
- Anita Sarkeesian (Feminist Frequency)
Game/play scholars:
- Mary Flanagan ("Critical Play")
- Tracy Fullerton ("Game Design Workshop")
- Brenda Laurel ("Toward the Design of a Computer-Based Interactive Fantasy System")
- Janet Murray ("Hamlet on the Holodeck"l
- Susana Tosca ("A Pragmatics of Links")
- Jichen Zhu ("Agency Play: Dimensions of Agency for Interactive Narrative Design")
- Magy Seif El Nasr ("Design patterns to guide player movement in 3D games")
- Kate Compton ("Causal Creators"; also "Spore")
P.S. upon consideration I've decided not to include any authors who are men in this coda.
There are definitely others who probably deserve to be here that I'm forgetting...
#GsmeDesign #Authors

CineWild: Balancing Art and Robotics for Ethical Wildlife Documentary Filmmaking
Pablo Pueyo, Fernando Caballero, Ana Cristina Murillo, Eduardo Montijano
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24921

CineWild: Balancing Art and Robotics for Ethical Wildlife Documentary Filmmaking
Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have become powerful tools across domains-from industry to the arts. In documentary filmmaking, they offer dynamic, otherwise unreachable perspectives, transforming how stories are told. Wildlife documentaries especially benefit, yet drones also raise ethical concerns: the risk of disturbing the animals they aim to capture. This paper introduces CineWild, an autonomous UAV framework that combines robotics, cinematography, and ethics. Built on model pr…

PhishLumos: An Adaptive Multi-Agent System for Proactive Phishing Campaign Mitigation
Daiki Chiba, Hiroki Nakano, Takashi Koide
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.21772 https://

PhishLumos: An Adaptive Multi-Agent System for Proactive Phishing Campaign Mitigation
Phishing attacks are a significant societal threat, disproportionately harming vulnerable populations and eroding trust in essential digital services. Current defenses are often reactive, failing against modern evasive tactics like cloaking that conceal malicious content. To address this, we introduce PhishLumos, an adaptive multi-agent system that proactively mitigates entire attack campaigns. It confronts a core cybersecurity imbalance: attackers can easily scale operations, while defense rem…

California Sen. Adam Schiff and U.S. Rep. Laura Friedman call on Trump to consider a federal film and TV tax credit, instead of 100% tariffs on foreign films (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Legislators to Trump: Consider a Federal Film and TV Tax Credit Instead
Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Laura Friedman, who are both attempting to pull together bipartisan bills proposing such an incentive, were quick to respond to the president on Monday.

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval
Orion Weller, Michael Boratko, Iftekhar Naim, Jinhyuk Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21038 https://

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval
Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and more. These new benchmarks push embeddings to work for any query and any notion of relevance that could be given. While prior works have pointed out theoretical limitations of vector embeddings, there is a common assumption that these difficulties are exclusively due to unrealistic queries, and those that are not ca…

Day 6: Kamome Shirahama
Before I wander much father afield, I'd be remiss not to include at least one Mangaka (I've got 8 on my planning list; if you think Manga is pushing it just wait until you see what the next few days have in store).
I'm currently following "Witch Hat Atelier," and it's absolutely amazing in several dimensions: first class world-building, deep philosophical themes, nuanced diverse cast, tightly-constructed interwoven plots, deep mysteries that keep everything churning and show up in unexpected places, absolutely stellar art both in terms of in-panel depictions and page layouts (some are Watchmen-quality), especially if you are sartorially inclined, and general kindness of its core messages. This is a series I wish every programmer would read, because it includes excellent advice about software design in multiple ways (did I mention there's an intricate and logical magic system within which the main character innovates in legible-to-the-reader-as-innovation ways?). Also, I bet I would have enjoyed this just a much as a 10-year-old as I'm enjoying it in my 30's, which is something that takes well-honed skill to pull off.
Shirahama is a master of her craft, and I'm honestly kinda surprised to see Witch Hat is only her second series. Definitely thinking how I can get my hands on her earlier work in English.
#20AuthorsNoMen

A test of seven AI chatbots' abilities to identify news photos' location, date, and photographer showed all failed to consistently identify photos' provenance (Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/why-ai-models-are-bad-at-verifyi…

Why AI models are bad at verifying photos
Many of the latest large language models, including OpenAI’s recently released GPT-5, tout an impressive capability: reasoning about images. We have seen viral trends of AI models geolocating obscure vacation pictures, impressive demos of LLMs correctly analyzing blurry or cropped photos, and promising results on benchmark tests. These seem to be fueling punditry on whether […]

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading