Tootfinder

last time I saw cereal for 8 fucking dollars was in Belize and that is because BZE$2 = USD $1

Sources: top Chinese VCs are close to raising up to $1.1B in total USD-denominated funds in 2025, marking a tentative return of global capital to Chinese tech (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/c753e570-78ef-4a6a-9cdd-bdb7efa5ad50

I would guess that 98% of my microcontroller needs are a cheap board I can program using the Arduino IDE along with any of the zillion of existing libraries out there.
Thanks to Earle Philhower's arduino-pico project I switched to using the $4 USD Raspberry Pi Pico years ago, and I was using the Teensy LC boards before that but those were discontinued. (I like the Teensy boards but they are more than I need for 98% of my projects.)

Sony Music reports Q1 revenue up 5.3% YoY to $3.22B, operating income up 8% YoY to $641.8M, and USD-denominated streaming revenue up 7.3% YoY to $1.36B (Glenn Peoples/Billboard)
https://www.billboard.com/pro/sony-music-lifts-revenue-increases-full-year-fo…

Sony Music Lifts Revenue 5% to $3.22B, Increases Full-Year Forecast
Gains from streaming services in both recorded music and publishing pushed Sony Music’s consolidated revenue up 5.3% in the quarter ended June 30.

@… and their Open Source Network donate in total $11500 to the #Perl and #Rakulang communities through @…

Inducing State Anxiety in LLM Agents Reproduces Human-Like Biases in Consumer Decision-Making
Ziv Ben-Zion, Zohar Elyoseph, Tobias Spiller, Teddy Lazebnik
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06222

Inducing State Anxiety in LLM Agents Reproduces Human-Like Biases in Consumer Decision-Making
Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly evolving from text generators to autonomous agents, raising urgent questions about their reliability in real-world contexts. Stress and anxiety are well known to bias human decision-making, particularly in consumer choices. Here, we tested whether LLM agents exhibit analogous vulnerabilities. Three advanced models (ChatGPT-5, Gemini 2.5, Claude 3.5-Sonnet) performed a grocery shopping task under budget constraints (24, 54, 108 USD), before and after expo…

Well, fuck.

🚨 Abeer’s family is in the danger zone in North Gaza and must move South to survive Israel’s genocide.
Her message to me on Signal just now:
“I actually need more than $3,000 USD. My campaign is in Australian dollars, and the amount I currently have on the link is not enough.
We spoke with a driver (I got his number from Joy), and he asked for $2,000 USD just for transportation. The cost of a tent is around $1,500 USD, and renting the land also costs a large amount.”
…

Unsupervised Multi-channel Speech Dereverberation via Diffusion
Yulun Wu, Zhongweiyang Xu, Jianchong Chen, Zhong-Qiu Wang, Romit Roy Choudhury
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02071 h…

Unsupervised Multi-channel Speech Dereverberation via Diffusion
We consider the problem of multi-channel single-speaker blind dereverberation, where multi-channel mixtures are used to recover the clean anechoic speech. To solve this problem, we propose USD-DPS, {U}nsupervised {S}peech {D}ereverberation via {D}iffusion {P}osterior {S}ampling. USD-DPS uses an unconditional clean speech diffusion model as a strong prior to solve the problem by posterior sampling. At each diffusion sampling step, we estimate all microphone channels' room impulse responses (RIRs…

Die Zentralafrikanischen Republik legt ein Investitionsprogramm in Höhe von 12,8 Mrd. USD auf, "in Verbindung mit umfangreichen staatlichen Reformen und Anreizen für Unternehmen ... Bis 2028 sind 543 konkrete Projekte definiert. So soll die Armutsquote massiv reduziert werden, 2.300 Kilometer asphaltierte Nationalstraßen werden gebaut, 3.000 Kilometer Glasfaser-Kabel verlegt und die Elektrifizierungsquote von 4% auf 38% gesteigert."

China plans to allow its first stablecoins in a bid to internationalize the CNY, as policymakers warn that dollar-backed tokens cement USD's global dominance (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/fa719421-c349-4397-af2d-6089bb00c598

Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors
Rafael Cathomen, Mayank Mittal, Marin Vlastelica, Marco Hutter
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19953

Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors
Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their application to real-world robotics remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose a modular USD framework to address the challenges in the safety, interpretability, and deployability of the learned skills. Our approach employs user-defined factorization of the state space to learn disentangled skill representations. It assig…

I am sad to be one of the Canadians who’ve chosen to avoid discretionary travel to the US, under the current government, that they’re talking about in this video.
As a comparison, here are my in-the-US discretionary spends for the first halves of 2023, 2024, 2025. This does not include air travel or accommodation. This is in-person spending on things like restaurants, gas, entertainment, parking, food.
2023Q1Q2: 1763.97 USD
2024Q1Q2: 1455.82 USD
2025Q1Q2: 172.12 USD

TraceLLM: Security Diagnosis Through Traces and Smart Contracts in Ethereum
Shuzheng Wang, Yue Huang, Zhuoer Xu, Yuming Huang, Jing Tang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03037 https:/…

TraceLLM: Security Diagnosis Through Traces and Smart Contracts in Ethereum
Ethereum smart contracts hold tens of billions of USD in DeFi and NFTs, yet comprehensive security analysis remains difficult due to unverified code, proxy-based architectures, and the reliance on manual inspection of complex execution traces. Existing approaches fall into two main categories: anomaly transaction detection, which flags suspicious transactions but offers limited insight into specific attack strategies hidden in execution traces inside transactions, and code vulnerability detecti…

The Impact of Shared Telecom Infrastructure on Digital Connectivity and Inclusion
Georges V. Houngbonon, Marc Ivaldi, Emil Palikot, Davide Strusani
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19693

The Impact of Shared Telecom Infrastructure on Digital Connectivity and Inclusion
Nearly half the world remains offline, and capital scarcity stalls new network buildouts. Sharing existing mobile towers could accelerate connectivity. We assemble data on 107 tower-sharing deals in 28 low-income countries (2008-20) and estimate staggered difference-in-differences effects. Two years after a transaction covering over 1,000 towers, the PPP-adjusted mobile-price index falls USD 1.60 (s.e. 1.10) from a baseline of USD 3.16, while data prices drop USD 1.00 (0.29), baseline USD 3.41 …

Europe Is Investing More Than $2.5 Million To Promote Plant-Based Foods #Europe

Europe Is Investing More Than $2.5 Million To Promote Plant-Based Foods
Europe is investing more than USD $2.5 million to promote plant-based foods via EIT for the newly announced ISAAP project

People in India/Brazil/Mexico: assuming equiv of USD 10 is too high, what is a reasonable price for the EPUB version of PLAI (plai.org) in INR/BRL/MXN? Making available via Kindle store. [NB: Free EPUB will always be available at book site, no worries!]

https://www.agrarheute.com/markt/marktfruechte/beyond-meat-kaempft-ums-ueberleben-fleischersatz-veggieboom-vorbei-636379
Inzwischen interessieren mich pflanzlich basierte "Fleisch"-Produkte zunehmend…

Beyond Meat kämpft ums Überleben – Fleischersatz und Veggieboom vorbei?
Beyond Meat ist nicht insolvent – der Hersteller von pflanzlichem Fleischersatz hat aber 1,2 Mrd. USD Schulden.

Discogs statement on U.S. tariffs #VinylRecords @…

My old #LFC mug was fading badly from the dishwasher. So, I bought a new one a couple of days ago from the official store. $20.80 including shipping.
I guess I don't order internationally often enough to have been hit by the #tariffs before. I got an email from UPS tonight, shaking me down for 2.5x…

Toller Name: «Climate Investment»
> Since its last financing round, #ANYboticX has received a further USD 20 million from existing and new investors, including Climate Investment, which is backed by companies such as Aramco, bp, Chevron, Shell and TotalEnergies.

Complexity of Financial Time Series: Multifractal and Multiscale Entropy Analyses
Oday Masoudi, Farhad Shahbazi, Mohammad Sharifi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23414 https://

Complexity of Financial Time Series: Multifractal and Multiscale Entropy Analyses
We employed Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MF-DFA) and Refined Composite Multiscale Sample Entropy (RCMSE) to investigate the complexity of Bitcoin, GBP/USD, gold, and natural gas price log-return time series. This study provides a comparative analysis of these markets and offers insights into their predictability and associated risks. Each tool presents a unique method to quantify time series complexity. The RCMSE and MF-DFA methods demonstrate a higher complexity for the Bitcoin…

Good Morning #Canada
Normally, I'm posting about history or geography or trivia, but the July tourism numbers are dominating the news. We "Nasty" Canadians are choosing not to visit the USA, and trips across the border continue to drop month after month. At the end of 2024, U.S. tourism revenue from Canadians was projected to increase 16%. Surprise! Losses by USA businesses are already estimated to be in excess of $20B USD, and some states are bracing for government cuts due to a decrease in sales taxes.
#CanadaIsAwesome #ElbowsUp
https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2025/08/11/canadian-car-visits-us-plunge-37-percent/

RedotPay, which offers stablecoin cards and multicurrency wallets, raised $47M from Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Ventures, and others at a $1B valuation (James Hunt/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/372293/stablecoin-payments-fi…

I talked to another neighbor, one of the serious rode bike people and showed him the ebike I've been riding and he said (meekly) "Is an ebike cheating?" and I said "Well, who am I cheating? Am I competing with someone?"
"Actually, you know who I'm cheating? The automotive industry! And honestly, doesn't that make me a champion?"
(He then told me about recently getting a single tire for his car replaced which was over $400 USD.)

SoK: Stablecoins for Digital Transformation -- Design, Metrics, and Application with Real World Asset Tokenization as a Case Study
Luyao Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02403 h…

SoK: Stablecoins for Digital Transformation -- Design, Metrics, and Application with Real World Asset Tokenization as a Case Study
Stablecoins have become a foundational component of the digital asset ecosystem, with their market capitalization exceeding 230 billion USD as of May 2025. As fiat-referenced and programmable assets, stablecoins provide low-latency, globally interoperable infrastructure for payments, decentralized finance, DeFi, and tokenized commerce. Their accelerated adoption has prompted extensive regulatory engagement, exemplified by the European Union's Markets in Crypto-assets Regulation, MiCA, the US Gu…

Soon, Trump will demand the issuance of USD 1000 notes with his own face on it.
#prediction #cringe

Quantum Machine Learning, Quantitative Trading, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning
Jun-Hao Chen, Yu-Chien Huang, Yun-Cheng Tsai, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09176

Quantum Machine Learning, Quantitative Trading, Reinforcement Learning, Deep Learning
The convergence of quantum-inspired neural networks and deep reinforcement learning offers a promising avenue for financial trading. We implemented a trading agent for USD/TWD by integrating Quantum Long Short-Term Memory (QLSTM) for short-term trend prediction with Quantum Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (QA3C), a quantum-enhanced variant of the classical A3C. Trained on data from 2000-01-01 to 2025-04-30 (80\% training, 20\% testing), the long-only agent achieves 11.87\% return over aroun…

Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Fluctuations
Yongheng Hu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15169 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.15169…

Monetary Policy and Exchange Rate Fluctuations
In this paper, we model USD-CNY bilateral exchange rate fluctuations as a general stochastic process and incorporate monetary policy shock to examine how bilateral exchange rate fluctuations affect the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index. Numerical simulations indicate that as the mean of bilateral exchange rate fluctuations increases, i.e., currency devaluation, the RCA index rises. Moreover, smaller bilateral exchange rate fluctuations after the policy shock cause the RCA index to grad…

Les États-Unis prévoient de déplacer toute la population du Territoire palestinien du Gaza. Ceux qui accepteraient de partir recevraient 5000 USD ainsi qu'une aide couvrant quatre ans de loyer et un an de nourriture. Les propriétaires terriens se verraient quant Š eux offrir des "jetons numériques", Š utiliser pour financer une nouvelle vie ailleurs ou Š échanger contre un appartement dans l'une des six Š huit nouvelles "villes intelligentes et alimentées par l'IA".
https://www.rts.ch/info/monde/2025/article/plan-americain-pour-gaza-deplacement-massif-et-reconstruction-controversee-28984635.html

Sources: at least six of China's biggest VC firms are targeting a combined $2B in new USD-denominated funds to allow overseas investment in Chinese startups (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-18/chi…

Bullish says it has received all $1.15B in capital raised from its IPO in stablecoins, including USDC, USDG, and PYUSD, marking a first for US public markets (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/08/

Crypto Platform Bullish (BLSH) Takes IPO Proceeds in USDC, Ripple USD and Other Stablecoins
Most of the proceeds were settled on Solana and predominantly in Circle's USDC token.

Measuring CEX-DEX Extracted Value and Searcher Profitability: The Darkest of the MEV Dark Forest
Fei Wu, Danning Sui, Thomas Thiery, Mallesh Pai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13023

Measuring CEX-DEX Extracted Value and Searcher Profitability: The Darkest of the MEV Dark Forest
This paper provides a comprehensive empirical analysis of the economics and dynamics behind arbitrages between centralized and decentralized exchanges (CEX-DEX) on Ethereum. We refine heuristics to identify arbitrage transactions from on-chain data and introduce a robust empirical framework to estimate arbitrage revenue without knowing traders' actual behaviors on CEX. Leveraging an extensive dataset spanning 19 months from August 2023 to March 2025, we estimate a total of 233.8M USD extracted …

Generating Actionable Robot Knowledge Bases by Combining 3D Scene Graphs with Robot Ontologies
Giang Nguyen, Mihai Pomarlan, Sascha Jongebloed, Nils Leusmann, Minh Nhat Vu, Michael Beetz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11770

Generating Actionable Robot Knowledge Bases by Combining 3D Scene Graphs with Robot Ontologies
In robotics, the effective integration of environmental data into actionable knowledge remains a significant challenge due to the variety and incompatibility of data formats commonly used in scene descriptions, such as MJCF, URDF, and SDF. This paper presents a novel approach that addresses these challenges by developing a unified scene graph model that standardizes these varied formats into the Universal Scene Description (USD) format. This standardization facilitates the integration of these …

TSMC reports Q2 net profit up ~60% YoY to ~$13.53B, beating estimates, and forecasts ~30% sales growth in USD terms in 2025, up from mid-20% previously (Debby Wu/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/tsmc-p…

Stablecoins: Fundamentals, Emerging Issues, and Open Challenges
Ahmed Mahrous, Maurantonio Caprolu, Roberto Di Pietro
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13883 http…

Stablecoins: Fundamentals, Emerging Issues, and Open Challenges
Stablecoins, with a capitalization exceeding 200 billion USD as of January 2025, have shown significant growth, with annual transaction volumes exceeding 10 trillion dollars in 2023 and nearly doubling that figure in 2024. This exceptional success has attracted the attention of traditional financial institutions, with an increasing number of governments exploring the potential of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). Although academia has recognized the importance of stablecoins, research in…

One month before elections in Argentina, USA is giving 20 billion USD to Milei to avoid Argentina bankruptcy and election loss. https://english.elpais.com/economy-and-business/2025-09-24/us-negotiates-20-billion-bailout-and-debt-purchase-with-argentina.html