Tootfinder

More than 1,400 dead across Asia after ‘rare’ cyclone & typhoon converge https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2025/12/more-than-1400-dead-across-asia-after-rare-cyclone-typhoons-converge/

More than 1,400 dead across Asia after ‘rare’ cyclone & typhoon converge
At least 1,400 people have died as a result of flooding and landslides across Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, with many more still missing. The unusual combination of a tropical typhoon and two tropical cyclones is behind the mounting humanitarian disaster. Scientists and meteorologists note that Cyclone Senyar formed just north of the equator, […]

Macron böjer sig för de franska bönderna och lovar nu att Frankrike ska rösta mot EU:s frihandelsavtal med Mercosur. https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/live/2026/

EN DIRECT, colère des agriculteurs : la France votera « contre » le traité de libre-échange avec le Mercosur, annonce Emmanuel Macron
Le chef de l’Etat a invoqué un « rejet politique unanime » pour se positionner contre ce texte, défendu par l’UE mais décrié par les agriculteurs qui ont manifesté ce jeudi. Le ministre de l’intérieur a fait état de 67 actions dans 39 départements, mobilisant 2 200 manifestants et 625 tracteurs.

Alexandru Stan, founder of the software marketplace Tekpon, has acquired The Next Web media and events brands from The Financial Times (Mike Butcher/Pathfounders)
https://pathfounders.com/p/exclusive-marketplace-owner-acquires-the-next-web

Exclusive: Software marketplace owner acquires The Next Web, plans relaunch

🇫🇷 France has introduced a subsidy scheme for electric farm machinery, including 🚜 tractors and other equipment.
https://agirpourlatransition.ademe.fr/entreprises/aides-financieres/catalogue/2025/engins-agr…

Robust forecast aggregation via additional queries
Rafael Frongillo, Mary Monroe, Eric Neyman, Bo Waggoner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.05271 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.05271
arXiv:2512.05271v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the problem of robust forecast aggregation: combining expert forecasts with provable accuracy guarantees compared to the best possible aggregation of the underlying information. Prior work shows strong impossibility results, e.g. that even under natural assumptions, no aggregation of the experts' individual forecasts can outperform simply following a random expert (Neyman and Roughgarden, 2022).
In this paper, we introduce a more general framework that allows the principal to elicit richer information from experts through structured queries. Our framework ensures that experts will truthfully report their underlying beliefs, and also enables us to define notions of complexity over the difficulty of asking these queries. Under a general model of independent but overlapping expert signals, we show that optimal aggregation is achievable in the worst case with each complexity measure bounded above by the number of agents $n$. We further establish tight tradeoffs between accuracy and query complexity: aggregation error decreases linearly with the number of queries, and vanishes when the "order of reasoning" and number of agents relevant to a query is $\omega(\sqrt{n})$. These results demonstrate that modest extensions to the space of expert queries dramatically strengthen the power of robust forecast aggregation. We therefore expect that our new query framework will open up a fruitful line of research in this area.
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On Dec. 6, people across the United States marched.
They protested.
They carried banners:
No war on Venezuela.
No blood for oil.
US hands off Venezuela.
They chanted and waved Venezuelan flags.
Trump says he’s coming to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
-- He’s promised it’s only a matter of time.
The United States has amassed the largest military buildup in the Caribbean since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. 
But accordi…

Thousands march across US against Trump’s drive for war in Venezuela
Over the weekend, thousands of people protested in more than 65 cities across the United States against US intervention in Venezuela. This is episode 80 of Stories of Resistance.

Student-led ICE protests erupt across Washington County amid enforcement crackdowns (Julia Silverman/Oregonian)
https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2025/12/student-led-ice-protests-erupt-across-washington-county-amid-enforcement-crackdowns.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/251209/p144#a251209p144

#Steady
Unterschätzen #Arbeitnehmer die Auswirkungen von KI auf den eigenen #Job?
Wie realistisch schätzt man eigentlich die eigenen

Unterschätzen Arbeitnehmer die Auswirkungen von KI auf den eigenen Job?
Neue Forsa-Zahlen zeigen: 72 % halten ihren Job für KI-sicher. Doch Verdrängung kann einen teuer zu stehen kommen.

ThreatModeler, which helps developers identify vulnerabilities in their applications, acquires IriusRisk, its largest competitor, a source says for $100M (Leo Schwartz/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/01/08/invictus-threatmodeler-irius…

Exclusive: Invictus-backed cybersecurity company ThreatModeler acquires competitor IriusRisk for over $100 million
As AI coding increases, so does the need for robust cybersecurity practices, CEO Matt Jones told Fortune.

High levels of ‘forever chemical’ found in cereal products across Europe – study https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/04/high-levels-of-forever-chemical-found-in-cereal-products-across-europe-study<…