Tootfinder

A newly expanded policy from the Trump administration could require travelers from five World Cup-qualified countries to front a bond of up to $15,000 in order to enter the United States for the tournament.
Visa bonds operate like security deposits:
a one-time payment meant to be refunded after a traveler exits the US under the terms of their visa.
The amounts generally run between $5,000 and $15,000, and are required for passport holders from certain countries to enter the…

Mistral launches Voxtral TTS, an open-source enterprise text-to-speech model that supports nine languages, including Hindi and Arabic, based on Ministral 3B (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/26/mistral-releases-a-new-open…

Mistral releases a new open-source model for speech generation | TechCrunch
Mistral's new speech model can run on a smartwatch or a smartphone.

Even if ICE CBP presence in the Twin Cities goes back to pre-Dec levels (which to be clear it •has not• yet done), we will be living with this for a long time. The world will be moving on, the national press will forget about us no doubt, but we’ll be living with this.
Nobody here thinks we’re done. But a lot of us are cautiously hopeful that we are now entering a time where this is some room for repairing and rebuilding.
Cautiously hopeful. But vigilant.
/end

Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds,
has given us the "Hero Developer":
a figure who ships features at midnight,
who “moves fast and breaks things,”
who transforms whiteboard scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.
We celebrate this person constantly.
They're on the front page of TechCrunch et al.
They keynote conferences.
Their G…

The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us

Far from Hormuz, a second Middle East strait enters the crosshairs (Scott Waldman/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/26/iran-war-strait-mandeb-energy-00845751
http://www.memeorandum.com/260326/p132#a260326p132

The title already hits the nail on its head.
Further down in the article: "Compelled speech isn’t free speech, guys. And this is nothing more than a blatant intimidation campaign to frighten away reporters from reporting the truth about Palantir."
#Palantir #Republik

The way Dodford pulls off a narrative arc for a half-hour-long biopic almost entirely out of quotes and clips never ceases to amaze me.
The Vanishing of Ryan Gosling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12GADjataDQ

Taking up all the remaining oxygen in the room right now is AI hype,
exemplified by Jared Kaplan, who is quoted in this article:
-- ⭐️ --
"I spoke to Jared Kaplan, co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind the chatbot Claude.
He was a physicist the last time we spoke.
As a grad student at Harvard in the 2000s, he worked with the renowned theorist Nima Arkani-Hamed to open up the new directions in amplitude research that are being actively pursued today.

Is Particle Physics Dead, Dying, or Just Hard? | Quanta Magazine
Columnist Natalie Wolchover checks in with particle physicists more than a decade after the field entered a profound crisis.