Tootfinder

Dnipro largely without electricity and water following explosion: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/07/dnipro-largely-without-electricity-and.html

Filings: Meta has hired Bill McGinley, a veteran Republican operative and the former top lawyer for DOGE, as a lobbyist (Emily Birnbaum/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-08/meta-hires-former-doge-trump-elect…

IRS Direct File,
the electronic system for filing tax returns for free,
will not be offered next year,
the Trump administration has confirmed.
An email sent Monday from IRS official Cynthia Noe to state comptrollers that participate in the Direct File program said that
“IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026. No launch date has been set for the future.”
The program developed during Joe Biden’s presidency
was credited by users with…

IRS Direct File won't be available next year for submitting tax returns for free
The Trump administration has decided not to offer the IRS' electronic tax filing system for free next year, and its future is unclear. An IRS official informed state comptrollers in an email Monday that "IRS Direct File will not be available in Filing Season 2026." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said better alternatives exist and the private sector can do a better job. The program, developed during Joe Biden's presidency, was praised for making tax filing easy and economical. However, it face…

Electric cargo ships crossing oceans could be just 3 years away. CATL's marine division has already supplied batteries for 900 vessels and is making big strides with sodium-ion tech.
Falling battery prices are finally making long-range electric shipping economically viable—a huge step toward zero-carbon ocean freight.

CATL Expects Oceanic Electric Ships in 3 Years - CleanTechnica
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe. News in batteries and electrification has been coming fast and furious lately. Recently, Su Yi, the head of CATL’s marine division, stated, “CATL’s marine business already covers inland rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, and is now advancing toward ocean-going applications.” ... [continued]

Filing: Samsung plans to acquire $1.73B of its stock for employee and executive compensation, as part of a performance-linked scheme introduced in October 2025 (Kyu-seok Shim/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/samsung-e…

Myanmar releases six journalists from prison, all detained following the military's 2021 coup, but continues to hold at least 27 journalists behind bars (Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2025/12/myanmar-releases-six-journalists-in-pre-el…

Myanmar releases 6 journalists in pre-election amnesty - Committee to Protect Journalists
Bangkok, December 4, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists welcomes the recent release of six journalists in Myanmar as part of a pre-election amnesty of more than 3,800 political prisoners, but urges junta authorities to free all remaining jailed members of the press. Those freed are Zaw Linn Htut (Phoe Thar), Htet Htet Khine, Nay Naw, Nyein Chan Wai, Aung San Lin, and Sithu...

Robust forecast aggregation via additional queries
Rafael Frongillo, Mary Monroe, Eric Neyman, Bo Waggoner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05271
arXiv:2512.05271v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of robust forecast aggregation: combining expert forecasts with provable accuracy guarantees compared to the best possible aggregation of the underlying information. Prior work shows strong impossibility results, e.g. that even under natural assumptions, no aggregation of the experts' individual forecasts can outperform simply following a random expert (Neyman and Roughgarden, 2022).
In this paper, we introduce a more general framework that allows the principal to elicit richer information from experts through structured queries. Our framework ensures that experts will truthfully report their underlying beliefs, and also enables us to define notions of complexity over the difficulty of asking these queries. Under a general model of independent but overlapping expert signals, we show that optimal aggregation is achievable in the worst case with each complexity measure bounded above by the number of agents $n$. We further establish tight tradeoffs between accuracy and query complexity: aggregation error decreases linearly with the number of queries, and vanishes when the "order of reasoning" and number of agents relevant to a query is $\omega(\sqrt{n})$. These results demonstrate that modest extensions to the space of expert queries dramatically strengthen the power of robust forecast aggregation. We therefore expect that our new query framework will open up a fruitful line of research in this area.
toXiv_bot_toot

"the [Chinese] plan removes #ElectricVehicles from the list of strategic emerging industries. That move has been misread by some commentators as a retreat. It is better seen as a milestone of maturity. When an industry no longer needs preferential support or policy protection, it has crossed from experiment to normalcy"

White House deputy chief of staff and Homeland Security adviser
Stephen Miller posted an ominous, captionless threat after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election on Tuesday night. 
“Almost 50 percent of New Yorkers live in households with at least one immigrant,”
read the screenshot he posted from NYC.gov titled “Family Household Types by Immigration Status”
“Over one million children, equaling 62 percent of the children in New York …

Stephen Miller Posts Cryptic Threat After Zohran Mamdani’s Win
The Trump administration is already vowing to go after New York following Zohran’s election win.

Taiwanese prosecutors charge Tokyo Electron for failing to prevent staff from allegedly stealing TSMC trade secrets, indicting the company on several counts (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-02/taiwan-charg…