Tootfinder

In the past two weeks, at least three WaPo editorials have taken on matters in which Jeff Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake (David Folkenflik/NPR)
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/28/nx-s1-558793…

Belgium has hit back against an EU plan to use Russia’s frozen assets to aid Ukraine,
describing the scheme as “fundamentally wrong”
and throwing into doubt how Europe will fund Kyiv.
Belgium hosts €183bn of Russian assets, about two-thirds of the Russian assets immobilised in the west, at the Brussels-based central securities depository Euroclear.
In a sharply worded letter, Belgium’s prime minister, Bart De Wever, said the proposal violated international law and woul…

Enhancing Credit Risk Prediction: A Meta-Learning Framework Integrating Baseline Models, LASSO, and ECOC for Superior Accuracy
Haibo Wang, Lutfu S. Sua, Jun Huang, Figen Balo, Burak Dolar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22381

Enhancing Credit Risk Prediction: A Meta-Learning Framework Integrating Baseline Models, LASSO, and ECOC for Superior Accuracy
Effective credit risk management is fundamental to financial decision-making, necessitating robust models for default probability prediction and financial entity classification. Traditional machine learning approaches face significant challenges when confronted with high-dimensional data, limited interpretability, rare event detection, and multi-class imbalance problems in risk assessment. This research proposes a comprehensive meta-learning framework that synthesizes multiple complementary mod…

Internal memo: Meta's head of AI product Nat Friedman says Vishal Shah, who previously led the metaverse unit, is joining his team to lead AI product management (Hannah Murphy/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/89a089db-432e-44eb-96e3-21f9ffce555c

La Direction générale de l'armement s'interroge sur le maintien d'une capacité de char lourd avant l'arrivée du MGCS - Zone Militaire
https://www.opex360.com/2025/10/26/la-dire

La Direction générale de l'armement s'interroge sur le maintien d'une capacité de char lourd avant l'arrivée du MGCS - Zone Militaire
Lors de son audition qui s'est tenue à l'Assemblée nationale dans le cadre de l'examen du projet de loi de finances 2026, le Délégué général pour

Interesting blog, TPU vs GPU.
#TPU

The chip made for the AI inference era – the Google TPU
I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.

The whole thing is optimized for scams, deception and other criminal behavior:
- user interface that deceptively pretends it's a human you're talking to
- claims from companies highly exaggerate capabilities
companies and "experts" constantly hype "AGI" which they (funnily enough) do to both make investors greedier and spread fear and as a distraction because these algorithms can't actually do what they keep promising
- large-scale accounting and financial fraud (e.g. what Nvidia is doing with circular selling)
- biggest case of copyright infringement in history
Note: I think the underlying technology is really cool, and definitely has use cases and can be used for actually good things. But: some technology just has more downsides than upsides, and some should only be used by experts in controlled environments. Leaded gasoline, asbestos and chlorofluorocarbon are also all really cool technology.
In this case perhaps the techology itself doesn't do anything inherently bad, however the people making it are lying about what it can do, the people selling it are motivated purely by greed and the people using it (often forced to do so) are being deceived.

A look at Chinese food delivery giant Meituan's subsidy war with Alibaba and JD.com, leading Meituan to a big Q3 loss and internal debate over global expansion (Eleanor Olcott/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/ab22c799-6370-4f8c-9256-d5bfd28e0aa1

‘It’s been an expensive year’: Meituan counts cost of China’s delivery wars
Competition from Alibaba and JD.com for fast-growing instant retail market has hit the Beijing-based group

While much of the recent interest in Jeffrey Epstein has focused on the late sexual predator’s relationship with Donald Trump,
his emails also reveal his close relationships with other powerful figures from the worlds of politics, finance, academia and beyond.
The thousands of files released by the House Oversight Committee earlier this month include his correspondence from April 2011 through January 2019, after he was already a registered sex offender for abusing underage girls…

“The Epstein Class”: Anand Giridharadas on the Elite Network Around the Sexual Predator
While much of the recent interest in Jeffrey Epstein has focused on the late sexual predator’s relationship with President Donald Trump, his emails also reveal his close relationships with other powerful figures from the worlds of politics, finance, academia and beyond. The thousands of files released by the House Oversight Committee earlier this month include his correspondence from April 2011 through January 2019, after he was already a registered sex offender for abusing underage girls in …

Klarna launches KlarnaUSD, its first stablecoin, running on Stripe and Paradigm's Tempo blockchain, aiming to "reduce costs" in international payments (Pritam Biswas/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/k