Tootfinder

The UK's Channel 4 purchases a majority stake in a production company, Firecrest Films, for the first time; it will now be able to own British IP (Max Goldbart/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/09/channel-4-buys-firecrest-films-first-majorit…

Channel 4 Makes History By Taking First Ever Majority Stake In A Production Company
Channel 4 has bought Firecrest Films, the producer of 'Murder Trial' and its first ever majority stake in a production company.

Product idea announcement:
Securing your company's most important digital assets of the 21st century: [productA] transforms your most valued AI prompts into blockchain-secured NFTs.
(Yes, I feel dirty to have come up with such an idea. But I won't be the only one coming up with such 💩, and by posting it I can later tell people "See? ProductB is just plagiarism!". I don't have any plans to make such a product. If your moral code allows you to do it to exploit …

Decentralized messaging protocol XMTP developer Ephemera raised a $20M Series B at a $300M equity and $750M network valuation, following a $20M Series A in 2021 (Yogita Khatri/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/363026/ephemera-xmtp-fu…

Inverse design of drying-induced assembly of multicomponent colloidal-particle films using surrogate models
Mayukh Kundu, Michaela Bush, Chris A. Kieslich, Michael P. Howard
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10645

Inverse design of drying-induced assembly of multicomponent colloidal-particle films using surrogate models
The properties of films assembled by drying colloidal-particle suspensions depend sensitively on both the particles and the processing conditions, making them challenging to engineer. In this work, we develop and test an inverse-design strategy based on surrogate modeling to identify conditions that yield a target film structure. We consider a two-component hard-sphere colloidal suspension whose designable parameters are the particle sizes, the initial composition of particles, and the drying r…

Approximate polymorphisms of predicates
Yaroslav Alekseev, Yuval Filmus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12155 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.1…

Approximate polymorphisms of predicates
A generalized polymorphism of a predicate $P \subseteq \{0,1\}^m$ is a tuple of functions $f_1,\dots,f_m\colon \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ satisfying the following property: If $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(m)} \in \{0,1\}^n$ are such that $(x^{(1)}_i,\dots,x^{(m)}_i) \in P$ for all $i$, then also $(f_1(x^{(1)}),\dots,f_m(x^{(m)})) \in P$. We show that if $f_1,\dots,f_m$ satisfy this property for most $x^{(1)},\dots,x^{(m)}$ (as measured with respect to an arbitrary full support distribution $μ$ on $P$), th…

So Bitvise, the developer of an SSH client that competes with PuTTY, the widely-used open-source SSH and Telnet client, somehow got hold of the domain putty.org and is using it to promote its own products.
Here's how Bitvise responded to a tech blogger/journalist who wrote about this situation.
https://blog.pupred.…

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.02.651847v1 "underscoring the role of experience in directing compensatory plasticity following early sensory loss.&q…

Complex three-dimensional rearing environments amplify compensatory plasticity following early blindness
The neocortex has a remarkable capacity to alter its functional organization and connectivity in response to sensory loss, particularly if this loss occurs early in life. A key question is whether this cross-modal reorganization is driven by sensory deprivation itself or through enhanced use of the spared senses. We investigated how different rearing environments shape neural responses in primary somatosensory cortex (S1) of short-tailed opossums ( Monodelphis domestica) , following elimination…

Sen. Josh Hawley launches a probe of Meta following a report on its AI policy allowing sensual chats with kids, tells Zuckerberg to produce docs by September 19 (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/15/meta-ai-bot-child-investigation.html

Sen. Hawley to probe Meta AI bot policies for children following damning report
Sen. Josh Hawley called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to preserve relevant materials, including emails.

Roblox shares closed down 6.34% on Friday after the company was accused in two lawsuits of failing to sufficiently protect youngsters on its platform (Cecilia D'Anastasio/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Meta says it has taken down around 10M Facebook profiles so far this year that were impersonating or repeatedly reusing content from large content producers (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/14/following-youtu…

Following YouTube, Meta announces crackdown on 'unoriginal' Facebook content | TechCrunch
Like YouTube, Meta says it won't penalize users who are engaging with other people's content, doing things like making reaction videos, joining a trend, or adding their own takes.