Tootfinder

Netflix execs refute a rumor that creatives making movies or shows are told to repeat plot points in dialogue often because viewers are distracted by phones (Michael Schneider/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/netflix-execs-not-asking-re…

Netflix Execs Say They're Not Really Asking Creatives to Repeat Plots
At a press conference on Wednesday, Netflix execs stressed that they're not really asking creatives to repeat TV and film plots.

Prince Harry testified at London's High Court in his privacy case against Associated Newspapers, saying many articles made him "paranoid beyond belief" (Ellise Shafer/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/global/global/pr…

Prince Harry Daily Mail Case: Couldn't 'Complain' About Press as Royal
Prince Harry took the witness stand at London's High Court on Wednesday in his privacy case against the publisher of U.K. tabloid Daily Mail.

Décapitée et ostracisée au Salon de l’agriculture, l’Agence bio est au bord de l’explosion | Mediapart
https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/200226/decapitee-et-ostracisee-au-salon-de-l-agriculture-l-ag…

Décapitée et ostracisée au Salon de l’agriculture, l’Agence bio est au bord de l’explosion
La ministre de l’agriculture maintient son plan de démantèlement de l’agence de soutien à la filière bio et a fait en sorte de déclencher une procédure de licenciement de sa directrice Laure Verdeau.

Ski Rental with Distributional Predictions of Unknown Quality
Qiming Cui, Michael Dinitz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21104 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21104 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21104
arXiv:2602.21104v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We revisit the central online problem of ski rental in the "algorithms with predictions" framework from the point of view of distributional predictions. Ski rental was one of the first problems to be studied with predictions, where a natural prediction is simply the number of ski days. But it is both more natural and potentially more powerful to think of a prediction as a distribution p-hat over the ski days. If the true number of ski days is drawn from some true (but unknown) distribution p, then we show as our main result that there is an algorithm with expected cost at most OPT O(min(max({eta}, 1) * sqrt(b), b log b)), where OPT is the expected cost of the optimal policy for the true distribution p, b is the cost of buying, and {eta} is the Earth Mover's (Wasserstein-1) distance between p and p-hat. Note that when {eta} < o(sqrt(b)) this gives additive loss less than b (the trivial bound), and when {eta} is arbitrarily large (corresponding to an extremely inaccurate prediction) we still do not pay more than O(b log b) additive loss. An implication of these bounds is that our algorithm has consistency O(sqrt(b)) (additive loss when the prediction error is 0) and robustness O(b log b) (additive loss when the prediction error is arbitrarily large). Moreover, we do not need to assume that we know (or have any bound on) the prediction error {eta}, in contrast with previous work in robust optimization which assumes that we know this error.
We complement this upper bound with a variety of lower bounds showing that it is essentially tight: not only can the consistency/robustness tradeoff not be improved, but our particular loss function cannot be meaningfully improved.
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A report from House Oversight Committee Democrats delivers a damning recounting of the varied ways Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) violated cybersecurity protocols across nearly every executive branch agency.
Check out today's Metacurity for more on this crucial development and other infosec news you should know, including
--Palo Alto: attackers have moved from AI experimentation to AI operationalization,
--Dragos discovered three new ICS threat g…

DOGE linked to potential Russian, Chinese access to OPM systems, report
Palo Alto: attackers have moved from AI experimentation to AI operationalization, Dragos discovered three new ICS threat groups, European Parliament disabled AI features over cybersecurity concerns, Kenyan authorities used Cellebrite on human rights activist's phone, much more

Fact Check: Variety Did NOT Report Ian Miles Cheong Was Killed By An Iranian Missile In Dubai: https://benborges.xyz/2026/03/03/fact-check-variety-did-not.html

Sony sends ByteDance a C&D letter over Seedance 2.0, joining Netflix, Paramount, WBD, and Disney in condemning the model's AI-generated copyright infringement (Gene Maddaus/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/sony-seedance-protest-1236666951/

Sony Joins Studio Protest Against Seedance 2.0 Infringement
Sony has joined in the studios' protest against infringement on Seedance 2.0, citing 'Breaking Bad' and 'Spider-Verse' AI clips circulating online.

The MPA has sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, demanding it add safeguards against infringement on Seedance 2.0 and stop AI training on studios' IP (Gene Maddaus/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/motion-picture-assoc…

Motion Picture Association Pushes ByteDance to Curb Seedance 2.0
The Motion Picture Association sent a letter to ByteDance on Friday urging it to delete studio IP from the Seedance training dataset.

By not airing Colbert's interview with Talarico, CBS bowed to FCC pressure preemptively as the agency hasn't formally eliminated talk show equal time exemptions (Naman Ramachandran/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/steph

Stephen Colbert Says CBS Blocked James Talarico Interview
Stephen Colbert revealed CBS lawyers blocked his 'Late Show' interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico over FCC equal time rule concerns.

Nielsen: CBS's Golden Globes coverage reached 8.7M viewers, down 6% from 9.3M viewers in 2025, which was down 2% on 2024; the ceremony clashed with NFL coverage (Selome Hailu/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/golden-globes-2026-ratings-nik…

Golden Globes 2026 Ratings: 8.7 Million Viewers Against Football
The Golden Globes reached an average of 8.7 million viewers on Sunday night, which marked the ceremony's third year airing on CBS.