Tootfinder

Alphabet becomes the fourth company to reach a $3T market cap, joining Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple, after its stock jumped 4% on Monday (Jennifer Elias/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/15/alphabet-3-trillion-market-cap.html

Alphabet becomes fourth company to reach $3 trillion market cap
Google's parent company added hundreds of billions of dollars in value in September following a favorable ruling.

Extreme events and impact statistics for unipotent actions on the space of lattices
Jens Marklof, Andreas Str\"ombergsson, Shucheng Yu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11371 http…

Extreme events and impact statistics for unipotent actions on the space of lattices
This paper extends a recent extreme value law for horocycle flows on the space of two-dimensional lattices, due to Kirsebom and Mallahi-Karai, to the simplest examples of rank-$k$ unipotent actions on the space of $n$-dimensional lattices. We analyse the problem in terms of the hitting time and impact statistics for the unipotent action with respect to a shrinking surface of section, following the strategy of Pollicott and the first named author in the case of hyperbolic surfaces. If $k=n-1$, t…

Paramount's streaming head Cindy Holland says streaming movies are "not a priority", as CEO David Ellison says debate on value of theatrical releases is "over" (Matt Donnelly/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/film/news/par

Streaming Movies ‘Not a Priority’ at Paramount-Skydance
The new leadership team at Skydance's Paramount clarified their position on streaming and theatrically released films.

love to see this, surprised it hadn't been on my radar.
Protesters Against AI Militarization Rally at Scale AI in San Francisco
https://www.kqed.org/news/12051183/protesters-against-ai-militarization-rally-at-sca…

Filling MIDI Velocity using U-Net Image Colorizer
Zhanhong He, David Cooper, Defeng Huang, Roberto Togneri
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07751 https://arxiv.o…

Filling MIDI Velocity using U-Net Image Colorizer
Modern music producers commonly use MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) to store their musical compositions. However, MIDI files created with digital software may lack the expressive characteristics of human performances, essentially leaving the velocity parameter - a control for note loudness - undefined, which defaults to a flat value. The task of filling MIDI velocity is termed MIDI velocity prediction, which uses regression models to enhance music expressiveness by adjusting only th…

Jane Fonda is joining forces with more than 500 celebrities and Hollywood heavyweights to defend free speech.
The membership roll already includes scores of famous actors like Jamie Lee Curtis, Viola Davis, Whoopi Goldberg, Pedro Pascal, Natalie Portman and Michael Keaton.
Successful directors like Spike Lee and Ben Stiller have signed on, along with singer and actress Barbra Streisand and pop star and songwriter Billie Eilish.
Fonda, a star who has championed progressive cau…

Jane Fonda, other stars, revive the Committee for the First Amendment – a group that emerged when the anti-communist panic came for Hollywood
Even after the original group fizzled, many of its members were able to keep making films with progressive messages.

Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:
1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of further reducing them approaches infinity.
2. Efficiency prioritizes the measurable over the difficult-to-measure.
3. Efficiency prioritizes what those in power see (or imagine) over on-the-ground reality.
4. Following from 2 and 3, efficiency reduces the amount and quality of information flowing into a human system.
5. Efficiency foments institutional inflexibility.
6. By removing slack, efficiency causes small failures to cascade more readily and increases the risk of catastrophic failure.
7. Following rom 4, 5, and 6, efficiency trades small costs for massive risks: from failures, from missed opportunities, and from inability to adjust.
8. Efficiency, when pushed, strangles the emergent phenomena that in the long term create all new things of value.
9. Thus, although it can be a by-product of evolution, efficiency as a goal in itself strangles evolution.
10. Efficiency as a goal strangles joy.

Abstract Landscapes
(Bernina range, on the approach to Lago di Fellaria, Sep 2025)
Everything about this place is so special: the road to the trailhead (with 1700m elevation gain), the scale of the majestic ~4000er (meters) mountains with their glaciated peaks. Observing the different levels/layers of this upper valley where the glaciers have already mostly receded, the parts which have been flooded with a reservoir (slowly drying out), the equally spectacular & tragic waterfa…

Evaluating the Predictive Value of Preoperative MRI for Erectile Dysfunction Following Radical Prostatectomy
Gideon N. L. Rouwendaal, Dani\"el Boeke, Inge L. Cox, Henk G. van der Poel, Margriet C. van Dijk-de Haan, Regina G. H. Beets-Tan, Thierry N. Boellaard, Wilson Silva
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.03461

Evaluating the Predictive Value of Preoperative MRI for Erectile Dysfunction Following Radical Prostatectomy
Accurate preoperative prediction of erectile dysfunction (ED) is important for counseling patients undergoing radical prostatectomy. While clinical features are established predictors, the added value of preoperative MRI remains underexplored. We investigate whether MRI provides additional predictive value for ED at 12 months post-surgery, evaluating four modeling strategies: (1) a clinical-only baseline, representing current state-of-the-art; (2) classical models using handcrafted anatomical f…

Austria's privacy regulator finds that Microsoft violated EU law by illegally tracking students through its Microsoft 365 Education software (Suzanne Smalley/The Record)
https://therecord.media/microsoft-violated-eu-law-austria

Microsoft violated EU law in handling of kids’ data, Austrian privacy regulator finds
Austria's data protection authority ruled that Microsoft illegally tracked students using its education software by failing to give them access to their data and using cookies without consent.