Tootfinder

In recent months, the federal government has relentlessly prosecuted protesters, government critics, immigrants and others arrested during immigration operations,
👉often accusing them of physically attacking officers or interfering with their duties.
⭐️But many of those cases have recently been dismissed or ended in not guilty verdicts.
In several high-profile cases, the prosecutions fell apart because they relied on statements by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offic…

based on highly unscientific observation over the past 6 weeks, the t***a dealership i regularly walk by in brooklyn has stopped selling c********ks, no longer on the showroom floor & none parked out back. https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/116103440455128250

Ars Technica (@arstechnica@mastodon.social)
Attached: 1 image Tesla slashes Cybertruck prices as it tries to move (unpainted) metal The stainless steel pickup truck is Tesla's first real flop. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/02/tesla-slashes-cybertruck-prices-as-it-tries-to-move-unpainted-metal/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

AheadComputing, which develops a breakthrough RISC-V CPU architecture for AI, raised a $30M Seed2 led by Eclipse, Toyota, and Cambium, for $53M in total funding (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/01/21/aheadcomputing-lands-3…

AheadComputing lands $30M to build RISC-V processors for AI data centers - SiliconANGLE
AheadComputing lands $30M to build RISC-V processors for AI data centers - SiliconANGLE

How Pakistan's government is increasingly using in absentia convictions and arrest warrants against Pakistani journalists living overseas, starting in late 2025 (Committee to Protect Journalists)
https://cpj.org/2026/01/harassed-at-ho

Harassed at home, convicted abroad: Pakistan steps up prosecution of overseas journalists - Committee to Protect Journalists
Pakistan’s government has stepped up the use of in absentia convictions and arrest warrants against Pakistani journalists living overseas since late 2025, highlighting an escalating crackdown by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s government on critical reporting and commentary that extends beyond domestic borders. In early January, four foreign-based Pakistani journalists and commentators were convicted on the...

12 ordinary LA jurors say “No!” to ICE goons and federal prosecutors.
At least part of the constitution still lives and does its job:
the Sixth Amendment's right to a jury trial to decide criminal charges.
Jury acquits L.A. man who towed immigration agent’s car during TikTok influencer’s arrest
-- Susan E Seager

Spatially-informed transformers: Injecting geostatistical covariance biases into self-attention for spatio-temporal forecasting
Yuri Calleo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17696 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.17696 https://arxiv.org/html/2512.17696
arXiv:2512.17696v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The modeling of high-dimensional spatio-temporal processes presents a fundamental dichotomy between the probabilistic rigor of classical geostatistics and the flexible, high-capacity representations of deep learning. While Gaussian processes offer theoretical consistency and exact uncertainty quantification, their prohibitive computational scaling renders them impractical for massive sensor networks. Conversely, modern transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling but inherently lack a geometric inductive bias, treating spatial sensors as permutation-invariant tokens without a native understanding of distance. In this work, we propose a spatially-informed transformer, a hybrid architecture that injects a geostatistical inductive bias directly into the self-attention mechanism via a learnable covariance kernel. By formally decomposing the attention structure into a stationary physical prior and a non-stationary data-driven residual, we impose a soft topological constraint that favors spatially proximal interactions while retaining the capacity to model complex dynamics. We demonstrate the phenomenon of ``Deep Variography'', where the network successfully recovers the true spatial decay parameters of the underlying process end-to-end via backpropagation. Extensive experiments on synthetic Gaussian random fields and real-world traffic benchmarks confirm that our method outperforms state-of-the-art graph neural networks. Furthermore, rigorous statistical validation confirms that the proposed method delivers not only superior predictive accuracy but also well-calibrated probabilistic forecasts, effectively bridging the gap between physics-aware modeling and data-driven learning.
toXiv_bot_toot

DOJ vowed to punish those who disrupt Trump's immigration crackdown. Dozens of cases have crumbled
https://apnews.com/article/ice-immigration-protests-prosecutions-doj-arrests-591f155d50c13756842e033ea23f16d3

Dozens of felony cases have crumbled in DOJ's push to punish protesters
The Justice Department has embarked on a months-long effort to prosecute people accused of assaulting federal officers during protests of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Attorney General Pam Bondi has vowed such offenders will face “severe consequences.” But DOJ has struggled to deliver on that commitment, according to a review by The Associated Press of 166 federal criminal cases brought since May against protesters in four Democratic-led cities at the epicenter of demonst…

🦜 Interpol-backed police make nearly 200 arrests in Amazon region gold mining sweep
https://news.mongabay.com/short-article/2026/01/interpol-backed-police-make-nearly-200-arrests-in-amazon-region-gold-mining-s…

Interpol-backed police make nearly 200 arrests in Amazon region gold mining sweep
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Police and prosecutors from Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana and Suriname have arrested nearly 200 people in their first-ever joint cross-border operation targeting illegal gold mining in the Amazon region, authorities said Thursday. The operation was backed by Interpol — the international police cooperation agency that helps law enforcement agencies in different countries […]

The memory shortage that is spiking RAM prices is now expanding to the broader PC market, driving price hikes for GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and hard drives (Andrew Cunningham/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/0

RAM shortage chaos expands to GPUs, high-capacity SSDs, and even hard drives
GPU makers may prioritize more profitable models; large SSDs are harder to find.

The Commission of Fine Arts,
a panel whose members were all appointed last month by Donald Trump,
unanimously approved a plan for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom on Feb. 19,
clearing one of the hurdles on the controversial project.
The seven-member panel also includes former lead architect on the project -- James McCrery, who abstained from voting due to his role.
Trump took to Truth Social to celebrate the approval on the $400 million project, which is…

Arts panel approves Trump ballroom despite 99% negative public comment
The Commission of Fine Arts unanimously approved a plan for a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom on Feb. 19.