Tootfinder

The Trump regime imposed sanctions on HateAid from Germany, for its support for victims of hate and intimidation on the social media platforms owned by Trump's billionaire buddies. You can follow HateAid here: @…

Scharfe Kritik an "inakzeptablen" US-Sanktionen gegen HateAid-Spitze
Von den USA verhängte Einreiseverbote für die Geschäftsführerinnen der Organisation HateAid ziehen massive Kritik der Bundesregierung nach sich. Die EU verteidigt ihre Digitalgesetze - und will sich gegen "ungerechtfertigte Maßnahmen" wehren.

Precious metals soared Monday
— with gold extending its record run past $5,100 per troy ounce and silver surging to new highs
— as investors continued to load up on hard assets as a hedge against geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty.

Gold was up 2.4 percent on New York’s COMEX commodities exchange before pulling back;
it had crossed the $5,000 threshold for the first time a day earlier.
Silver, which tends to be more volatile, spiked 14.6 percent Mon…

Why gold and silver prices are surging at breakneck speeds
A record-setting rally in precious metals comes as global investors diversify away from the U.S. dollar, a phenomenon known as the “debasement trade.”

StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)
https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/stepfun-series-b-round-470495/

Tencent-backed China LLM unicorn StepFun bags $720m in Series B+ round
StepFund expects to deploy its LLMs into over one million vehicles this year.

Dynamic reversal of IT-PFC information flow orchestrates visual categorization under perceptual uncertainty https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2025.12.17.695044v1 Quite a mouthful to say that "the brain actually reverses its information flow when things get blurr…

Sparse Bayesian Deep Functional Learning with Structured Region Selection
Xiaoxian Zhu, Yingmeng Li, Shuangge Ma, Mengyun Wu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20651 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.20651 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.20651
arXiv:2602.20651v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In modern applications such as ECG monitoring, neuroimaging, wearable sensing, and industrial equipment diagnostics, complex and continuously structured data are ubiquitous, presenting both challenges and opportunities for functional data analysis. However, existing methods face a critical trade-off: conventional functional models are limited by linearity, whereas deep learning approaches lack interpretable region selection for sparse effects. To bridge these gaps, we propose a sparse Bayesian functional deep neural network (sBayFDNN). It learns adaptive functional embeddings through a deep Bayesian architecture to capture complex nonlinear relationships, while a structured prior enables interpretable, region-wise selection of influential domains with quantified uncertainty. Theoretically, we establish rigorous approximation error bounds, posterior consistency, and region selection consistency. These results provide the first theoretical guarantees for a Bayesian deep functional model, ensuring its reliability and statistical rigor. Empirically, comprehensive simulations and real-world studies confirm the effectiveness and superiority of sBayFDNN. Crucially, sBayFDNN excels in recognizing intricate dependencies for accurate predictions and more precisely identifies functionally meaningful regions, capabilities fundamentally beyond existing approaches.
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Plans for a massive new #Oracle datacentre in the US state of Michigan have been left in limbo after funding talks with its key financial partner broke down.
https://www.comput…

Oracle datacentre plans uncertain after key funding talks collapse
Plans for a massive new Oracle datacentre in the US state of Michigan have been left in limbo after funding talks with its key financial ...

Sources detail how Tiger Global fueled the COVID-era unicorn bubble that burst ahead of the AI boom; the firm recently shared its $12.7B 2021 fund is now up 16% (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/tiger-global-unicorn-investment-crash/

Big bets and broken unicorns: Tiger Global’s rise and reckoning
The fast-money pandemic era helped build billion-dollar startups around the world — then brought many down just as quickly. Will the AI boom be a repeat?

A Ukrainian arms company says it has modified one of its
ground robots to carry and launch
unjammable fiber-optic drones.
Ukrainian forces can put the drones in the air closer to the front without exposing pilots.
Ratel Robotics shared a video this week of its Ratel H model robot
equipped with a protected box.
In the clip, the launcher opens up and releases a small drone connected to a fiber-optic cable.
The uncrewed ground vehicle functions as a …

These new Ukrainian ground robots can launch unjammable fiber-optic drones close to the front so troops don't have to
The Ratel Robotics' robot launches fiber-optic drones close to the front lines in Ukraine so operators can stay farther back and safer.

Crunchyroll announces it is shutting down its free ad-supported streaming option on December 31; Crunchyroll subscriptions start at $7.99/month or $79.99/year (Luke Bouma/Cord Cutters News)
https://cordcuttersnews.com/crunchyroll-is-shutting-down-its-free…

Crunchyroll is Shutting Down Its Free Ad-Supported Plan | Cord Cutters News
Crunchyroll will eliminate its ad-supported free tier on December 31, 2025, ending the last remaining way to legally watch anime on the platform without paying a subscription fee. The change, delivered unceremoniously through an in-player message that replaced a scheduled advertisement, marks the quiet conclusion of an option that had persisted, in increasingly limited form, […]

Data analytics company Fractal, which became India's first AI unicorn in 2022, raised $313M in its Mumbai IPO; its shares fell 5% amid a weak Indian IPO market (Rajesh Mascarenhas/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20