Tootfinder

Sources: AI contractor marketplace Mercor is finalizing $350M in funding led by Felicis at a $10B valuation; founded in 2023, Mercor manages 30K contractors (Angel Au-Yeung/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/te…

Sources: David Ellison will keep WBD mostly intact in a possible Paramount merger, merge HBO Max into Paramount , keep creative teams, and target 30 films/year (Christopher Palmeri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Another one bites the dust.
Russia's oil & gas money machine is being demolished. Repairs were already hampered by sanctions on critical components from abroad, but skilled crews should also be in short supply by now.
https://kyivind…

Russian gas processing plant stops production following drone attack, Reuters reports
The Astrakhan gas processing plant in southern Russia has stopped production following a fire at the facility caused by a drone attack, three industry sources told Reuters.

Since there has been a shift in what people mean by referring to the F-word I assume that in the near future there will be quite a few confused people looking at how often the F-word is used in films and going: "569 times! Martin Scorsese must really hate gay people".
So, for the sake of Martin Scorsese's reputation, call it the "F-slur".

Sources: CNN staff were taken aback when Mark Thompson suggested easing up on covering Trump's East Wing demolition after a rare White House visit last week (Natalie Korach/Status)
https://www.status.news/p/mark-thompson-cnn-white-house-east-wing-demolition…

Mark Thompson’s D.C. Drop-In
CNN’s chief has Washington talking about his private meeting at the White House—following which he urged the network to ease up on coverage of Trump’s East Room demolition, Status has learned.

Implicit and Explicit Formulas of the Joint RDF for a Tuple of Multivariate Gaussian Sources with Individual Square-Error Distortions
Evagoras Stylianou, Charalambos D. Charalambous, Themistoklis Charalambous
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16301

Implicit and Explicit Formulas of the Joint RDF for a Tuple of Multivariate Gaussian Sources with Individual Square-Error Distortions
This paper analyzes the joint Rate Distortion Function (RDF) of correlated multivariate Gaussian sources with individual square-error distortions. Leveraging Hotelling's canonical variable form, presented is a closed-form characterization of the joint RDF, that involves {a system of nonlinear equations. Furthermore, for the special case of symmetric distortions (i.e., equal distortions), the joint RDF is explicitly expressed in terms of} two water-filling variables. The results greatly improve …

"How researchers tracked the biggest hidden sources of forever chemical pollution in UK rivers"
#UK #UnitedKingdom #PFAS

How researchers tracked the biggest hidden sources of forever chemical pollution in UK rivers
The amount of toxic "forever chemicals" flowing into the River Mersey in north-west England has reached some of the highest levels recorded anywhere in the world.

Photo-Thermally Tunable Photon-Pair Generation in Dielectric Metasurfaces
Omer Can Karaman, Hua Li, Elif Nur Dayi, Christophe Galland, Giulia Tagliabue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19051

Photo-Thermally Tunable Photon-Pair Generation in Dielectric Metasurfaces
Photon-pair sources based on spontaneous four-wave mixing (SFWM) in integrated photonics are often spectrally static. We demonstrate and model a fundamental thermo-optical mechanism that modulates photon-pair generation in amorphous silicon (a-Si) thin films and metasurfaces via SFWM. Femtosecond-pulsed excitation yields g2(0) higher than 400 in unpatterned a-Si, confirming high-purity nonclassical emission. Resonant a-Si metasurfaces produce photon pairs at rates exceeding 3.8 kHz under 0.6 mW…

Measuring the locations and properties of VHF sources emitted from an aircraft flying through high clouds
Olaf Scholten, Marten Lourens, Stijn Buitink, Steve Cummer, Joe Dwyer, Brian M. Hare, Tim Huege, Ningyu Liu, Katie Mulrey, Anna Nelles, Chris Sterpka, T. N. Gia Trinh, Paulina Turekova, Sander ter Veen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16574

Measuring the locations and properties of VHF sources emitted from an aircraft flying through high clouds
We show that it is possible to locate the few places on the body of an airplane, while it is flying through high clouds, from which broad-band, pulsed, radiation is emitted at Very High Frequency (VHF) radio frequencies. This serendipitous discovery was made whilst imaging a lightning flash using the Low-Frequency Array (LOFAR). This observation provides insights into the way the airplane sheds the electrical charge it acquires when flying through clouds. Furthermore, this observation allowed u…

Multimodal Representation-disentangled Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Recommendation
Hui Wang, Jinghui Qin, Wushao Wen, Qingling Li, Shanshan Zhong, Zhongzhan Huang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20225

Multimodal Representation-disentangled Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Recommendation
Multimodal data has significantly advanced recommendation systems by integrating diverse information sources to model user preferences and item characteristics. However, these systems often struggle with redundant and irrelevant information, which can degrade performance. Most existing methods either fuse multimodal information directly or use rigid architectural separation for disentanglement, failing to adequately filter noise and model the complex interplay between modalities. To address the…