Tootfinder

China's SMIC plans to acquire the remaining 49% stake in its SMNC unit for ~$5.8B, making the unit wholly owned, per a Shanghai Stock Exchange filing (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/chinas-smic-take-full-…

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Asher J. Hancock, Xindi Wu, Lihan Zha, Olga Russakovsky, Anirudha Majumdar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22195

Actions as Language: Fine-Tuning VLMs into VLAs Without Catastrophic Forgetting
Fine-tuning vision-language models (VLMs) on robot teleoperation data to create vision-language-action (VLA) models is a promising paradigm for training generalist policies, but it suffers from a fundamental tradeoff: learning to produce actions often diminishes the VLM's foundational reasoning and multimodal understanding, hindering generalization to novel scenarios, instruction following, and semantic understanding. We argue that this catastrophic forgetting is due to a distribution mismatch …

Filing: Sinclair offers to acquire Scripps for $7 a share in cash and stock, a 70% premium over Scripps' November 21 closing price of $4.12 (Rob Golum/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-24/sinclair-b…

Sinclair Bids to Buy Rival TV Broadcaster Scripps for $7 a Share
Sinclair Inc., one of the largest US TV broadcasters, offered to acquire competitor E.W. Scripps Co. for $7 a share in cash and stock.

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have turned on Attorney General Pam Bondi
and have reportedly begun drafting articles of impeachment
following the heavily opaque release of the Epstein files

Pam Bondi faces calls to be jailed as bipartisan articles of impeachment are drafted - NewsBreak
Several lawmakers accused Bondi of flouting the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which mandated the government to provide full disclosure of the Justice Dep

Thilak Mahendran (Agora Digitale Transformation) analysiert den #DeutschlandStack: Ein Projekt, das alles will – und nichts schafft. Statt klare Ziele zu definieren, wird der D-Stack zum „Container für Erwartungen“. Technisch solide, inhaltlich leer. „Fokussierung? Fehlanzeige.“ | c't | .digital

Source: Microsoft's and Nvidia's investments in Anthropic push its valuation to the range of $350B, up from its $183B valuation after raising $13B in September (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/18/anthropic-ai-azure-microsoft-nvidia.html

Anthropic valued in range of $350 billion following investment deal with Microsoft, Nvidia
Microsoft announced new strategic partnerships with Nvidia and the AI startup Anthropic.

Filings: Tether-owned Northern Data sold its bitcoin mining unit, Peak Mining, for up to $200M to a group including companies controlled by Tether executives (Nikou Asgari/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/352fc0e3-0f0d-4e72-abe6-dd992b040caa

Disney and Penn Entertainment agree to end ESPN Bet on December 1, after failing to capture significant market share; they signed a 10-year, $2B deal in 2023 (Christopher Palmeri/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sources: the EU Commission wants to decide if any of AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud should face new restrictions under the DMA, following several major outages (Samuel Stolton/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…

Bending Spoons acquires Eventbrite for ~$500M in an all-cash deal, following its $1.38B purchase of Vimeo and a pending acquisition of AOL (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/12/02/bending-spoons-to-acquire-eventbrite-in-500m-all-cash-deal/

Bending Spoons to acquire Eventbrite in $500M all-cash deal
Bending Spoons is acquiring the global event management platform Eventbrite in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $500 million. Eventbrite would become the latest major global brand to join the Bending Spoons portfolio. Last month, the company announced a definitive agreement to acquire AOL, pending customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. Bending Spoons also recently completed its $1.38 billion acquisition of Vimeo. “For two decades, Eventbrite has stood at the…