Tootfinder

Canadian payments company Nuvei agrees to acquire NY-based cross-border payments company Payoneer for ~$2.75B in cash; the deal is expected to close in mid-2027 (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/can…

🔊 #NowPlaying on #BBCRadio3:
#BBCProms
- 2026
Live at the BBC Proms: Spanish National Orchestra, conducted by David Afkham, with guitarist Rafael Aguirre perform Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez and Ravel’s Boléro.
Relisten now 👇
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002yxz0

Since it was relevant to a discussion I just had on here and is something most people probably haven't thought about much (unless you've taken one of a handful of philosophy classes), I thought I'd try to lay out a key piece of Descartes' Meditations (#philosophy

Aonde vocês estão que estš tanto frio assim? Eu estou com o ar condicionado ligado agora, jš que ventilador atrapalha muito a tarefa de corrigir provas (sai tudo voando).

Too Good to Be True: A Study on Modern Automatic Speech Recognition for the Evaluation of Speech Enhancement
Danilo de Oliveira, Tal Peer, Timo Gerkmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.12107 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.12107
arXiv:2605.12107v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Speech enhancement (SE) systems are typically evaluated using a variety of instrumental metrics. The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems to evaluate SE performance is common in literature, usually in terms of word error rate (WER). However, WER scores depend heavily on the choice of ASR system and text normalization pipeline. In this paper, we investigate how modern ASR models correlate with human recognition of enhanced speech. A listening experiment reveals that modern ASR models with large-scale noisy training and embedded language models correlate more with human WER than simpler ones, with a transducer model providing the most reliable transcriptions. Nevertheless, we also show that these models' robustness to noise and use of context can be uninformative to an acoustics-focused evaluation of enhancement performance.
toXiv_bot_toot

Japanese financial giant SBI Holdings agrees to acquire Bitbank, a top 10 Japanese crypto exchange by trading activity, for ~$289M, set to close in October (Jamie Crawley/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/06/

Japanese giant SBI Holdings to buy Bitbank for $289 million
SBI said the acquisition, which is subject to regulatory approval, is set to close in October.

I'm about to lose control, and I think I like it 🎶🎵
I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it 🎶🎵🎶🎶
https://blog.frankel.ch/java-geek-weekly/135/

Sources: Kraken is in talks to acquire a 15% stake in DeFi protocol Aave at a $385M valuation, investing 35,000 ETH in return for 250,000 AAVE tokens (Will Canny/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/06/2…

Kraken eyes 15% stake in DeFi lender Aave in deal valuing protocol at $385 million
The DeFi lender is rebuilding after the fallout from April's KelpDAO exploit sparked a multibillion-dollar exodus of deposits despite Aave itself not being hacked.

Thrive Holdings, a spinoff of Thrive Capital, commits $1B to acquire local accounting firms through its subsidiary, Current, and use AI to automate them (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/06/02/thr…

Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up
Thrive Holdings To Bet $1 Billion On AI-Powered Accounting Roll-Up

Filing: Amazon will acquire Apple's 20% stake in Globalstar as part of its acquisition of the satellite provider and create a subsidiary to conduct the merger (Michael Kan/PCMag)
https://www.pcmag.com/news/amazon-to-take-over-apples-20-…