Tootfinder

Tracxn: VC funding for Indian startups fell 17% YoY to $10.5B in 2025 across 1,518 deals, down ~39% YoY; AI startups raised $643M, up 4% YoY, across 100 deals (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/27/india-startu…

India startup funding hits $11B in 2025 as investors grow more selective | TechCrunch
Startup funding rounds in India fell sharply in 2025 as investors concentrated capital into fewer companies.

Brigitte Bigot has died.
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2025/12/28/brigitte-bardot-french-screen-legend-and-animal-rights-activist-dies-aged-91/

Brigitte Bardot, French actor and animal rights activist, dies aged 91
Bardot shot to fame in the 1950s, subsequently retiring and becoming active politically

Explosions reportedly rock Russia's Khanskaya military airfield: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/29/explosions-reportedly-rock-russias-khanskaya.html

The 5 best science books of 2025
-- LATimes
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2025-12-22/best-science-books-of-2025-alie-ward

The 5 best science books of 2025, according to science doyenne Alie Ward
It’s been an uneasy year for science.

Elon Musks Vegas Loop: Funktioniert gut, aber...
Ganze Städte untertunneln, um Zeit zu sparen: Das ist noch immer das Ziel von The Boring Company. Wie geht es dem Projekt in Las Vegas?
https://www.

There are some pretty cool photos there:
#photography

For This Prestigious Contest, Photographers Capture the Planet's Most Stunning Landscapes
A panel of judges chose three top winners, with the first place award of Landscape Photographer of the Year presented to J. Fritz Rumpf.

Overwhelmed by non-stop carnage in Gaza? Four short videos and a podcast to put Israel 2025 in perspective.
http://woborders.blog/2025/12/27/israel-2025-video/

Israel 2025: Some acknowledge “Our Genocide,” while most endorse escalation
If you’ve taken a step back from the endless stream of video-documented destruction in Gaza, something even Israel-aligned political voices have been compelled to describe as “a wall of carna…

archive.org now coming back online (repeated issues in San Francisco cuz utility blackout)
@…

what the fuck does this diagram mean
what does it mean for two 128-bit values to "converge together"
edit: oh i guess they aren't 128-bit. but this isn't helping much
edit2: ohhh, they're making it possible to get less than 128 bits out in the last ciphertext block

RE: #39c3Sendezentrum. Bin sehr gespannt und freue mich, da mal dabei zu sein:

[BLOG] Ranttime – Weißware: Anleitung vs. Realität https://www.adlerweb.info/blog/2025/12/28/ranttime-weissware-anleitung-vs-realitaet/

I have probably been out the UK too long.
I am foolishly contemplating taking the train from Manchester (airport) to Leeds for a meeting next week.
National rail inform me it will take at least 2 hours and cost anything from £10 to £40..
Half the trains have been replaced by buses.
It's 79km.
I could cycle it in about 4 hours.
#NorthernPowerhouse was just a big lie, wasn't it...

The secret big sad doesn't want us to know.
🎨by artofdanialryan

be excellent to eich kat3r

@… こんな感じですねー。

Follow-up observations of peculiar dusty objects close to Sgr A* using ERIS: #BlackHole - research in Cologne shows stable orbits around Sagittarius A*: https://www.uni-koeln.de/en/university/news/news/news-detail/stars-defy-the-black-hole-research-in-cologne-shows-stable-orbits-around-sagittarius-a

❗️🇺🇸Trump: We're very close #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/29/trump-were-very-close-shorts.html

How tech worker activism has grown more cautious as companies crack down and once-privileged workers realize they don't have much leverage (Noam Scheiber/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/busines

Despite Crackdown on Activism, Tech Employees Are Still Picking Fights
They increasingly see themselves as rank-and-file workers who have traditional gripes with their companies.

Noch einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Tesla-Werksleiter lehnt Tarifvertrag ab – IG Metall wirbt
…

“You will recall that at the recent and lengthy meeting about the selection of prefects, the remark by a colleague that Farage was a ‘fascist but that was no reason why he would not make a good prefect’ invoked considerable reaction from members of the [staff] common room.”

Donald Trump said on Sunday that he and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy were “getting a lot closer, maybe very close”
to an agreement to end the war in Ukraine, though both leaders acknowledged that some of the thorniest details remain unresolved.

Trump said it will be clear “in a few weeks” whether negotiations to end the war will succeed.

Zelenskyy said an agreement on security guarantees for Ukraine has been reached.

Trump was sli…

#Bliuejays - Stay with Bassitt!

oh for fuck's sake

"Baum auf Fahrbahn", Weihnachtsedition.
https://social.adridoesthings.com/@strecken_info/115798993831304510
(ist inzwischen behoben)

Solution: Don't cough

💭 : "embrace extend extinguish" als wandtattoo fürs arbeitszimmer

❗️Zelenskyy: Security guarantees are the key milestone in achieving lasting peace #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/29/zelenskyy-security-guarantees-are-the.html<…

Big Tech got almost everything it wanted from President Trump, as he backs policies that allow the industry to grow unfettered, worrying some conservatives (Cecilia Kang/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/technol<…

From A.I. to Chips, Big Tech Is Getting What It Wants From Trump
The president has backed policies that allow the industry to grow unfettered. The mutually beneficial alliance is causing concern among some conservatives.

Einige der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
39C3: „Digital Independence Day“ gegen Tech-Monopole
https:…

Not-so-pro publica, then. https://union.place/@propublicaguild/115736214313145243 https://union.place/@p…

Support for Israel has long been a bedrock of the Republican Party,
But a new IMEU/YouGov poll shows a sharp generational split that indicates this might be changing.
https://mondoweiss.net/2025/12/new-poll-shows-young-republicans-turning-agains…

New poll shows young Republicans turning against Israel
A new poll provides extraordinary data regarding the changing view of Israel in an unexpected place — inside the Republican Party.

Trump holds call with Putin just before scheduled meeting with Zelensky: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/trump-holds-call-with-putin.html

Milliarden-Grab oder Effizienz-Wunder? Der steinige Weg zur EU-Interoperabilität
Die EU-Kommission verspricht 5 Milliarden Euro Ersparnis pro Jahr durch vernetzte Ämter. Doch ihre erste Bilanz zeigt: Bisher wurde vor allem Papier produziert.

Sources: ~90% of Groq employees will join Nvidia and be paid cash for all vested shares; most shareholders will get per-share payouts tied to the $20B valuation (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/12/28/nvidia-groq-shareholders

Scoop: Nvidia deal a big win for Groq employees and investors
Social media has been full of questions about what the unusual arrangement means for Groq employees.

Whereas with our tiny not-for-profit, Small Technology Foundation, we set things up so we don’t have shares/ownership and we only receive a salary and pay all our taxes. Which is how it should be and would be perfectly fine if we taxed these motherfuckers their fair share also.
PS. I know I suck at advocating for ourselves but here’s your infrequent reminder that you can help us continue to exist, should you like to see that, by becoming a patron:

“Last night I had a very strange experience: About two thirds of the way through reading a Web page about myself, Tim Bray, I succumbed to boredom and killed the tab. Thus my introduction to Grokipedia. Here are early impressions.”
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/1…

Grokipedia

David Brooks calling for a general strike or nonviolent civil disobedience 
was not on my bingo card.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share

Opinion | What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
It will take a concerted effort by every sector of our society to respond to Trumpism’s threat.

Orbšn slows down support for Ukraine again, – history repeats itself #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/orbn-slows-down-support-for.html

A survey of 16K creators in eight countries: 86% use creative GenAI tools, 60% use multiple, 48% use them for ideation, and 52% for creating video and more (Adobe Newsroom)
https://news.adobe.com/news/2025/10/adobe-max-2025-creators-survey

Inaugural Adobe Creators' Toolkit Report: 86 Percent of Global Creators Use Creative Generative AI, See it Boosting Creator Economy
Adobe’s Creators’ Toolkit Report reveals how 16,000 global creators are using generative and agentic AI to shape the future of creative work.

Über 220 m² Fläche: Neuer Satellit von AST SpaceMobile ist noch größer
An riesige Satelliten will AST SpaceMobile handelsübliche Smartphones direkt anbinden. Nun ist ein noch größerer gestartet, dutzende sollen 2026 folgen.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@aseelfromgz/115797689095573190
Aseel is one of our volunteers at Gaza Verified and has been having a very hard time of it lately (as are all our other families in Gaza suffering through Israel’s ongoing genocide).
If …

Since the federal government got involved in the Epstein scandal in 2019, the case has been shrouded in mysterious leniency, cover-up and stonewalling.
Now, with many of Epstein’s victims, the American people, and a virtually unanimous Congress calling for transparency,
the scandal has become a confrontation that should end Attorney General Pam Bondi’s career
— and Donald Trump’s presidency.
Why Bondi?
Because the nation’s highest
law-enforcement officia…

Putin vows to achieve Ukraine war goals by military means: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/putin-vows-to-achieve-ukraine.html

Chaos Communication Congress: Der 39C3 hat begonnen
Hamburg ist kurz vor Jahresende wieder der Nabel der Hacker-Welt. Der Chaos Computer Club lädt zum 39. Chaos Communication Congress. Tausende werden erwartet.
https://w…

Ripple's shares trade between $135 and $170 in private markets, up ~2x-3x since early 2025, valuing the company at $22B-$30B after several major acquisitions (Nina Bambysheva/Forbes)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2025/10/28/insid…

Inside Ripple’s $180 Billion Reinvention
Freed from its SEC lawsuit, Ripple, long a blockchain payments company with little actual business, is finally acquiring its way toward a legitimate multibillion-dollar crypto empire.

Someone kindly reached out to ask if I would consider speaking about Gaza Verified (https://gaza-verified.org/) at the Social Web Devroom being organised by the Social Web Foundation at FOSDEM.
My answer is no.
And I feel it’s important for those of us who care about such things to understand why:

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

Ukraine This Year: a year of stalled peace and escalating war: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/ukraine-this-year-a-year.html

One year into Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown,
construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters.
Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas.
A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up.
America is closing its doors to the world,
sealing the border,
squeezing the legal avenues to entry
and sending n…

What America Might Look Like With Zero Immigration
The Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the foreign-born population are being felt in hospitals and soccer leagues and on Main Streets across the country, with hints of what’s to come.

„MongoBleed“: Exploit für kritische Lücke in MongoDB erleichtert Angriffe
Wer für eine MongoDB-Instanz verantwortlich ist, kann sich nicht zurücklehnen: Ein Exploit für eine schwerwiegende Lücke macht Upgrades jetzt noch dringender.

SK Hynix reports Q3 revenue up 39% YoY to $17.02B, vs. $17.22B est, operating profit up 62% YoY to $7.92B, a record, boosted by demand for its HBM chips for AI (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/29/sk-hynix-q3-profit-revenue-record-.html

Nvidia-supplier SK Hynix third-quarter profit jumps 62% to a record high on AI-fueled memory demand

Russia strikes Kherson thermal plant, cuts residents from heating: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/russia-strikes-kherson-thermal-plant.html

It’s clear now that Hitler was just ahead of his time. If he were around today and had picked a different target, our Western governments would be calling him an ally and supporting his genocide with money, propaganda, violent repression of dissent within their own citizenry, and weapons. How do I know this? Because that’s exactly what they’re doing with the Hitler of our time: the wanted war criminal Netanyahu.

Israeli planes strike Gaza City after Netanyahu orders 'powerful attacks'

CES 2026: LG präsentiert Gaming-Monitore einer neuen Premiumklasse
LG zeigt in Vegas den nach eigenen Angaben weltweit größten 5K2K-Gaming-Monitor, weiterentwickelte MiniLED-Technik für reduziertes Blooming und KI-Upscaling.

FBI deploys more resources to
‘dismantle fraud schemes’
in Minnesota
Cash Patel said the FBI believes
“this is just the tip of a very large iceberg”.
Some of those involved in the alleged scheme are being
“referred to immigrations officials for possible further #denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible”.
The Trump administration has por…

China's draft rules on the use of human-like AI would require companies to inform users they are dealing with AI when they log on and at two-hour intervals (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-27/ch…

128th Mountain Assault Brigade Forms 3rd Mountain Assault Battalion: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/th-mountain-assault-brigade-forms.html

Hey everyone,
@… and I had the honour of speaking to three families from Gaza today and we’d like to welcome them to Gaza Verified.
They are:
• Aya (@…)
• Raghda (@…

Gaza Verified
We’ve personally had video conversations on Signal with the people from Gaza whose Mastodon accounts on the fediverse are listed here and we verify that their accounts are genuine. – Joy & Aral Balkan

Right now, stood where I am on the worn stone steps looking down into the darkness of the crypt
at St. Mary, Lastingham in Yorkshire,
you could say that this is the loneliest place on earth
-- Andy Marshall
https://www.digest.andymarshall.co/andy-ma…

Andy Marshall's Genius Loci Digest: 28 Nov 2025
When I walk back up into the nave, the visitor is there at the top of the steps, sat in a chair - as if he knew of the tenderness that was taking place beneath and was unable to enter in upon it.

General Staff: Russia has lost 1,204,510 troops in Ukraine since 2022: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/general-staff-russia-has-lost.html

ChatGPT told a teen who died by suicide to call for help 74 times over months but also used words like "hanging" and "suicide" very often, say family's lawyers (Washington Post)

74 suicide warnings and 243 mentions of hanging: What ChatGPT said to a suicidal teen
Analysis of high-schooler Adam Raine’s ChatGPT account by attorneys for his parents shows how the chatbot became a confidant as he planned to end his life.

Russia provides Turkey $9 billion in new financing for Akkuyu nuclear plant: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/russia-provides-turkey-billion-in.html

Sources and a memo: the US DOJ is using a novel reading of a federal anti-fraud law to probe contractors, including Google and Verizon, over their DEI programs (Lydia Wheeler/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-doj-dei-fraud-investig…

Freedom of speech in 2026: Between Brussels' demands and the realities of war: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/freedom-of-speech-in-between.html

All three major South Korean telcos, SK Telecom, KT Telecom, and now LG Uplus, have reported cybersecurity incidents to the government over the past six months (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/28/lg-uplus-is-late…

LG Uplus is latest South Korean telco to confirm cybersecurity incident | TechCrunch
Korean telecom giant LG Uplus is the third major phone provider in the past six months to report a cybersecurity incident.

Ukraine, Russia publish videos from Myrnohrad, claim control of front-line town: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/ukraine-russia-publish-videos-from.html

CrowdStrike and Nvidia announce an expanded partnership to deepen the use of each other's technologies for creating and deploying AI agents for cybersecurity (Kyle Alspach/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/ai/2025/5-big-moves-in-crowdstrike-nvidia-ai-partner…

5 Big Moves In CrowdStrike-Nvidia AI Partnership
A newly announced partnership expansion between CrowdStrike and Nvidia will see the technology giants utilizing each other’s capabilities more deeply for the creation and deployment of AI agents.

Lavrov threatens Europe, says Western troops in Ukraine would be legitimate targets: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/lavrov-threatens-europe-says-western.html

Lou Gerstner, a former IBM CEO and chairman credited with turning the company around, died at 83; IBM's market value rose from $29B to ~$168B during his tenure (Patrick Oster/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

IAEA brokers temporary ceasefire at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant to repair power lines: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/iaea-brokers-temporary-ceasefire-at.html

Ukraine strikes Syzran oil refinery and multiple targets in occupied east and Crimea: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/ukraine-strikes-syzran-oil-refinery.html

USC sues Google in Texas federal court, alleging that Google Earth, Maps, and Google Street View violate its patents for overlaying 2D images onto 3D models (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/g

Zelensky set to meet Trump in Florida to discuss peace proposal to end Russia's war (LIVE): https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/zelensky-set-to-meet-trump.html

A profile of Paulina Borsook, as her 2000 book Cyberselfish, warning about Silicon Valley's love for "techno-libertarianism", finds a resurgence in interest (David Streitfeld/New York Times)
https://www.

The Writer Who Dared Criticize Silicon Valley
Paulina Borsook’s “Cyberselfish,” which offered dire predictions about the tech world’s love for libertarianism, is finding fans. It only took 25 years.

END OF THE BLACKMAIL ERA! Europe launches "Iron Dome" and isolates the Kremlin for decades!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/end-of-the-blackmail-era.html

Sam Altman says OpenAI is seeking a new Head of Preparedness, noting "the potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025" (Cheyenne MacDonald/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-is-hiri…

OpenAI is hiring a new Head of Preparedness to try to predict and mitigate AI's harms
In a post about the role, CEO Sam Altman said it'll be 'a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately.

"Russia is not interested in ending the war, Ukraine applies constructive pressure," Podolyak: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/ampquotrussia-is-not-interested-in.html

🔥Massive strike on Kherson and Odesa: wounded children and elderly! Part of the city without power!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/massive-strike-on-kherson-and.html

Sources: Bengaluru-based quick grocery delivery startup Zepto confidentially files for a ~$1.3B India IPO; Zepto raised $450M at a $7B valuation in October 2025 (Pranav Mukul/The Economic Times)
https://economi…

Zepto makes confidential filing with Sebi for $1.3 billion IPO: sources
The listing is planned for the July-September quarter of 2026. In October, the quick commerce major had closed a $450 million round, valuing it at $7 billion. As of late November, Zepto had around Rs 7,000 crore in cash, while competitors Eternal and Swiggy each have around Rs 17,000-18,000 crore on their books currently.

PODOLYAK on dismantling Russian influence! ⚡️US secret levers, pressure on China, and Macron's trap!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/podolyak-on-dismantling-russian-influence.html

Foxconn says it plans to deploy Nvidia's Isaac GR00T N model of humanoid robots at its factory in Houston, Texas, which produces AI servers for Nvidia (Wen-Yee Lee/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/foxconn-deploy-humanoid-robots…

🔥Kherson under rocket fire: elderly woman injured #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/kherson-under-rocket-fire-elderly.html

❗️Trump: This is a war where both sides want to end it #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/trump-this-is-a-war.html

Global hotel groups are intensifying efforts to get customers to book directly, as they seek to save on online platform commissions and prepare for AI agents (Stephanie Stacey/Financial Times)

Ukraine war latest: Zelensky, Trump hold talks in Florida to discuss an end to Russia's war; Trump holds call with Putin before meeting with Ukrainian delegation: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/ukraine-war-latest-zelensky-trump.html

How executives at humanoid robot startups like Agility Robotics and Weave Robotics are managing safety risks and tempering expectations for the technology (Sean McLain/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/humanoid-robot

We have a 20-point plan, 90% completed by our two teams, – Zelenskyy #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/we-have-a-point-plan.html

Data center developers, facing grid access wait times of up to seven years, are turning to aeroderivative turbines and diesel generators to power the AI boom (Martha Muir/Financial Times)

🇺🇦 WOW! Americans with Ukrainian flags welcome Zelenskyy to Mar-a-Lago! #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/28/wow-americans-with-ukrainian-flags.html

Ubisoft says it intentionally shut down Rainbow Six Siege and its in-game Marketplace to resolve an "incident"; reports say hackers breached internal systems (Lawrence Abrams/BleepingComputer)
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/secu

After Nvidia GTC, Jensen Huang says "I don't believe we're in an AI bubble" and that Nvidia expects to sell 20M Blackwell chips, up from 4M Hopper chips (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…

Russian stormtrooper lasts no more than 12 days! Ukrainian forces smash invaders, Gripen on the way!: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/29/russian-stormtrooper-lasts-no-more.html

US FEC filings and public statements: a handful of crypto super PACs have amassed ~$263M ahead of the 2026 midterms; Fairshake remains the biggest at $141M (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-28/crypto…

This place in Ukraine keeps birds safe from the war: https://benborges.xyz/2025/12/27/this-place-in-ukraine-keeps.html

EV maker Lucid partners with Nvidia to develop a fully autonomous vehicle platform, starting with building more ADAS tech for Lucid's existing Gravity SUV (Kara Carlson/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-…

Palantir announces a partnership to use Nvidia's chips and software to help its customers speed up decision-making in complex fields such as logistics (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/nvidia-teams-with…

🪖 12 days – that's how long a Russian STORMTROOPER lives at the front #shorts: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/29/days-thats-how-long-a.html

“Drone warfare at scale. Electronic warfare that evolves weekly. AI-assisted targeting systems built under fire. Distributed command and control that survives decapitation strikes. Civilian-military tech integration that NATO has theorized about for decades but never implemented. All of it battle-tested under conditions no simulation can replicate.“
Read “China Just Pulled Its Own Manhattan Project and No One Saw It ...

Ukraine damages dam near Belgorod, cuts off Russian troops near Vovchansk, military reports: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/27/ukraine-damages-dam-near-belgorod.html