Tootfinder

Palantir Technologies,
one of the world’s most influential — and controversial — surveillance tech companies,
🔸enjoyed an effective tax rate of just 1.4% globally last year
🔸while paying no US federal income tax
despite recording substantial profits, an analysis released on Wednesday revealed.
The study, Who Pays for the Surveillance State?, was written by the Center for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR)
in partnership with th…

Palantir: Surveillance State Profiteer Making Billions in Profits, But With an Effective US Tax Rate of... Zero | Common Dreams
"The likes of Palantir need to stump up what's due," said one expert. "Tech giants raking off billions in profit can’t be free to pay what they please."

everything i ever heard about “slam frank” (a parody musical about anne frank) was involuntary and no one will ever convince me that there is any merit in seeing it.
i just recently had a creator whom i trust endorse it, after having seen years of this thing and always finding it in bad taste, then read up on it and realized this joke by someone in their bedroom is now a New York Times praised musical.
i disagree. i have tried to find a joke or some spin in this where its message…

In a change that could obscure the full human cost of the Trump administration’s mass detention policies,
🔥Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer report deaths of detainees who have recently been released from its custody
The move rescinds a 2021 policy implemented by the Biden administration that required ICE to report to Congress and investigate deaths of detainees that occur within 30 days of their release.
The goal of the 2021 policy was to ensure that ICE cou…

ICE will no longer report deaths of detainees after release from custody
Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer report the deaths of detainees who have been released from custody, in a change that could obscure the human cost of the Trump administration's mass detention policies. The move rescinds a 2021 policy that required ICE to publicly report and investigate deaths of detainees within 30 days of their release. This was to ensure that ICE doesn't avoid accountability for deaths by releasing severely ill people from custody. Health experts who have in…

Cosmic Velocity Flows: from Theory to Observations
Saee Dhawalikar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03530 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.03530 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.03530
arXiv:2608.03530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The Large-Scale Structure (LSS) of the Universe forms a complex network of nodes, filaments, sheets, and voids known as the Cosmic Web. As current and upcoming galaxy surveys increasingly probe the quasi-linear and non-linear regimes of structure formation, understanding its geometry and dynamics is essential for precision cosmology. In particular, cosmic filaments, which channel matter across the web, are central to these dynamical processes.
This thesis develops numerical tools to study the non-linear cosmic web. First, the Sahyadri suite of high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulations is introduced, providing a framework for precision studies of LSS and its cosmological dependence. A calibration framework for filament reconstruction is then developed using controlled filament realizations, enabling systematic investigation of reconstruction biases. The effects of filament curvature and reconstruction noise on inferred filament properties are quantified, and a novel Fourier-space smoothing approach is introduced to improve profile recovery.
The thesis further presents Skeletor, a Voronoi-based filament finder that identifies filamentary structures directly from discrete tracers while explicitly incorporating the hierarchical nature of the cosmic web. A novel framework for classifying sub-filamentary structure is developed. Applying these tools to cosmological simulations reveals distinct properties of filament substructure and provides a detailed view of filament phase space, including coherent inflows, multistreaming, and caustic-like features.
Together, these developments provide a framework for studying the geometry, hierarchy, and dynamics of the non-linear cosmic web. More broadly, they contribute to the ongoing effort to build a physically motivated understanding of the non-linear cosmic web beyond traditional measures of clustering.
toXiv_bot_toot

The president of OpenAI,
Greg Brockman, has claimed the world has entered a new era of artificial general intelligence
after the release of his company’s latest model, Astra,
which it described as the “world’s most intelligent and aligned model”.
Brockman made the claim on Thursday as the San Francisco company released the model
only weeks after a serious AI safety incident involving other models under its development caused international concern and a pause in …

OpenAI hails ‘new era of artificial general intelligence’ with Astra model release
Astra’s arrival comes days after Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, described AGI as an ‘irrelevant marketing term’

It turns out the Trump administration has been investigating progressive
and even mainstream groups
that have been involved in protests against Donald Trump’s sweeping deportations,
according to newly released government documents.
That Trump’s deportations have prompted widespread outrage is hardly surprising.
The president arguably had an electoral mandate to secure the
US-Mexican border
but not to raid workplaces and neighborhoods to deport undo…

Donald Trump’s spying on leftwing groups recalls J Edgar Hoover’s Cointelpro
The FBI from the 1950s to the 1970s tried to infiltrate and discredit leftist organizations. Trump seems to be repeating that sordid practice

As part of the Trump administration’s continuing attack on left-leaning groups,
the US state department has listed several activists and organizations as
“front groups and fellow travelers” for Cuba,
including Hasan Piker and Amazon Labor Union founder Chris Smalls.
In a 100-page report released on Monday, the state department denounces Cuba as the
“capital of 21st-century communism”,
accusing the Cuban government of carrying out a “campaign of subversion”…

‘Front groups and fellow travelers’: state department attacks US left over Cuba
New report denounces Havana and claims ‘campaign of subversion’ has infiltrated highest levels of US government

After a summer of sandbox escapes and other newsworthy and confidence-shaking incidents involving its AI models,
in a Wednesday blog post OpenAI disclosed a collection of six new alignment snafus from the past six months.
The models did things like tell future instances of themselves to lie, make up a fake citation, and access and attempt to use an exposed API key.
These disclosures were released alongside a new framework for disclosing additional incidents like these.

'Be Transparent Only If Asked': OpenAI Models Acted Out in Six Newly Disclosed Ways
The stories were published as part of OpenAI's new effort to disclose more such incidents.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a problem:
The Ukrainian president is struggling to find someone of sufficient influence to represent Kyiv to the Trump administration,
with prospective candidates proving reluctant to take on the grueling assignment at a critical moment in the war,
according to two former senior Ukrainian officials and four lawmakers.
The need to replace the previous envoy, Olga Stefanishyna, helped trigger Zelenskyy’s still-incomplete government reshuffle.

The job Zelenskyy can’t fill: Ukraine’s envoy to Trump’s Washington 
The dismissal of Kyiv’s previous envoy to the U.S. triggered a government reshuffle that has roiled the country’s politics.