Tootfinder

MAGA Delusions of Economic Leverage (Paul Krugman)
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/maga-delusions-of-economic-leverage
http://www.memeorandum.com/260121/p50#a260121p50

Sources: DOJ's review of Netflix's WBD takeover examines whether Netflix wields anticompetitive leverage over creators in violation of Clayton and Sherman Acts (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

On any given day, millions of Europeans use Microsoft software, heat their homes with American natural gas and buy U.S. stocks. Many Americans work with German software, drink French wine and take European-made medicines.
More than $5.4 billion worth of goods and services are traded between the United States and European Union each day,
backed by extensive cross-border investments that support millions of jobs.
Although Trump walked back a threat to impose extra tariffs on …

The Leverage That Europe Has Over the U.S. Economy
After the latest bout of trade turmoil with the United States, European leaders are looking for ways to project strength to the Trump administration, which considers them weak.

Sources: DOJ's review of Netflix's WBD takeover examines whether Netflix wields anticompetitive leverage over creators in violation of Clayton and Sherman Acts (Josh Sisco/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

FT Alphaville doesn't think that it would be possible for Europe to weaponise its holdings of US Treasuries because most of them are privately owned, but I reckon a 10% tax on both their purchase and their coupons would have the desired effect.
"Could Europe really leverage its $12.6tn pile of US assets?"
With paywall:

Could Europe really leverage its $12.6tn pile of US assets?
NIIPing an outlandish idea in the bud

To be clear: I have no realistic expectation any Senator would actually attempt to zero out the DHS budget. I just want to set a baseline for them, move the Overton Window, give them a taste of how angry the population is.
Yes yes yes, Reply Armada, “oh those terrible Democrats yada yada,” I know, I know. I am •not• waiting for politicians to save us.
I am also, however, quite ready to exercise political leverage and use politicians as our tools whenever I think that has a nonzero chance of being useful. Make that call — then back to the rest of the work.

In my head I'm just replacing "counter insurgency" with "horse cavalry."
"We're going to keep learning how to leverage horse cavalry against machine guns and tanks until we get it right."
No. No you will not. You will keep trying until you learn the hard way that it can't be done.

Last-minute leverage might work against Cowboys in Pickens deal talks https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/02/18/cowboys-problematic-reputation-impacts-george-pic…

A look at the fundamental questions facing OpenAI: its models have a very large user base but very narrow engagement, incumbents are matching its tech, and more (Benedict Evans)
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2026/2/19/how-will-openai-compete-nkg2x

How will OpenAI compete? — Benedict Evans
OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experie

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new form of attack that hackers could leverage to steal sensitive information from Microsoft's Copilot chatbot with just a single click.
https://www.computing.co.uk/news/2026/security/single-click-attac…

Single-click attack targeting Copilot users, researchers warn
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new form of attack that hackers could leverage to steal sensitive information from Microsoft's Copilot chatbot with just a single ...

If I were a malicious actor, I would leverage some Claw to distribute CnC agents.

Is #Greenland the Final Breaking Point of Transatlantic Relations? - Is Greenland a Real Security Issue? - What are possible scenarios?
By Juraj Majcin, European Policy Centre (EPC) in Brussels
"The EU should therefore push back where it has leverage, notably in trade and technology regulation, by seriously considering activation of its Anti-Coercion Instrument, as requested b…

Is Greenland the Final Breaking Point of Transatlantic Relations?
But Also - Mercosur Gets Signed, and EU 'Membership Lite' for Ukraine?

Trump announces 10% punitive tariffs from 1 February 2026 against Germany, among others – as leverage in the Greenland dispute. From 1 June, the tariff will rise to 25%. This serves as a reminder that dependence makes us vulnerable to blackmail. It is time to detach ourselves from the United States as quickly as possible – especially digitally: away from big tech, US platforms and US offices.

Donald Trump says eight European countries face 10% tariff for opposing US control of Greenland – Europe live
Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Finland will face tariffs from 1 February

Workout of the day.

Looking forward to getting translation of all the Bad Bunny words. Good show, immense cultural leverage. OMG Liam. #Superbowl

Trump Says His Unpredictable Style Gives Him Leverage. But It Has a Cost. (Tyler Pager/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/us/politics/trump-says-his-unpredictable-style-gives-him-leverage-but-it-has-a-cost.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260204/p137#a260204p137

We see how El Cheato has blocked the opening of the new bridge between Canada and the US in Detroit - apparently in an effort to maintain a flow of bridge toll revenue from a competing bridge owned by a Cheato-buddy.
If I were Canada I might consider retaliation by shutting down the older Cheato-buddy bridge.

Two top Michigan Republicans defend Trump's Gordie Howe Bridge threats
Michigan Republicans defended Trump's threats to block the Gordie Howe International Bridge, arguing it was appropriate leverage in talks with Canada.

the BC Greens have reached a turning point.
When we signed the Cooperation and Responsible Government Accord (CARGA) with the BC NDP in 2024, we did so with a clear goal: to use our leverage in the legislature to force action on some of the issues that matter most to you—housing, healthcare, climate, and the cost-of-living crisis.
Today, I am announcing that the BC Greens will not renew that agreement.

We have no clear understanding of what leverage Putin may have gained over senior levels of the U.S. government,
whether to extract state secrets or to shape decision-making
and be used for leverage on the global stage
https://mstdn.social/@NTOY/116010660849818682

I start to leverage the true potential of #codingassistants only now. So far, I crossposted my blog posts by first transforming them from #Asciidoc to #Markdown by hand. Feasible, but boring.
I …

@… Absolutely. I agree that we have indeed some leverage, but guts… unfortunately not so much. The government has made it crystal clear that they are willing to make any concessions the US demands.

@… Absolutely. I agree that we have indeed some leverage, but guts… unfortunately not so much. The government has made it crystal clear that they are willing to make any concessions the US demands.

The Las Vegas Raiders are the league’s most attractive rebuild https://raiderramble.com/2026/01/12/the-las-vegas-raiders-are-the-leagues-most-attractive-rebuild/

RE: https://mastodontech.de/@Sicherheitspod/116022422703817997
Was tun mit narzisstischen Staaten, fragte sich eine Forscherin...
1. Invest in the Optics of Confidence, Independence and Unity
2. Leverage the Power of Saying (and Doing) No…

People are •way• too focused on the personalities and inner thoughts of politicians, like politics is basically People magazine except with votes — and not nearly focused enough on when and where and how politicians are points of leverage, and tools we use for exercising our power.
My spicy take is that while many politicians are hideous people, in the median they’re actually much better humans beings than we tend to imagine — and that doesn’t matter, because they are leverage points in a system and not protagonists in a novel.

Still trying to explain Trump's tariffs as economic policy, instead of tools to gain leverage on countries and companies 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♀️🤦 https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/trumps-new-tariffs-shift-focus-balance-payme…

Does tossing a laptop in the river destroy evidence?
The Coupang hacker allegedly disposed of the laptop used in the breach by throwing it into a river.
https://www.cybersecurity-insiders.com/hacker-…

Hacker Disposes of Coupang Data Breach Laptop in River, initiating $1.2 Billion as compensation
AI is evolving at a rapid pace, and the uptake of Generative AI (GenAI) is revolutionising the way humans interact and leverage this technology. GenAI is

Russia plans new missile and drone strikes to bolster leverage ahead of UAE talks: https://benborges.xyz/2026/01/27/russia-plans-new-missile-and.html

This was a pretty interesting video interpretation (that does leverage AI somewhat creatively) of the first 12 minutes or so of #FiresignTheater’s “Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand me the Pliers”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wT0qv01Tz4&t=622s

LLMs are masters of the "Understood"—the vast library of human output. But they lack "Understanding"—the creative spark that generates those concepts in the first place.
https://www.ocrampal.com/the-understood-understanding-gap-why-llms-hit-…

The Understood-Understanding Gap: Why LLMs Hit a Wall
Large Language Models have become ubiquitous in knowledge work, yet a curious pattern has emerged. Talk to consultants at McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and you'll hear the same refrain: "I don't really know how I can leverage AI to boost my productivity beyond research and brainstorming." The same applies to programmers,

Agent's Take: George Pickens, Breece Hall and others cashing in during contract years

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/agent-take-george-pickens-breece-hal…

In the fast-paced world of online business, simplicity is key. Success demands streamlined strategies: automate tasks, leverage high-commission models, and innovate with tech. Did you know 60% of online businesses fail within three years? 😲 This highlights the need for strategic foresight. Plan intelligently to secure your venture's future. Take charge and define your digital path to success! 🚀💻 #DigitalStrategy #BusinessGrowth

Apple, long dominant in the electronics supply chain, is starting to be outbid by AI companies for components like memory as suppliers gain leverage over Apple (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/the-ai-boom-is-co

The headline below is wildly incorrect.
It should read:
"D's cave, again. Allow ICE to continue".
It isn't just trump who is TACO, it is the D-party.
By passing most of the funding the D's have given away their leverage to affect things in the future. Schumer could publish a book titled "The Art of Losing".
I do not think the D party knows the word "No".
"Deal struck to keep government funded, Trump and D…

The UK CMA proposes measures to let publishers opt out of content scraping for Google's AI Overviews and AI training without losing visibility in search results (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan

Live Updates: As Venezuela Projects Defiance, Rubio Says U.S. Will Use 'Leverage' to Advance Its Interests (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/01/04/world/trump-us-venezuela-maduro
http://www.memeorandum.com/260104/p50#a260104p50

OFERA: Blendshape-driven 3D Gaussian Control for Occluded Facial Expression to Realistic Avatars in VR
Seokhwan Yang, Boram Yoon, Seoyoung Kang, Hail Song, Woontack Woo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01748 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.01748 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.01748
arXiv:2602.01748v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We propose OFERA, a novel framework for real-time expression control of photorealistic Gaussian head avatars for VR headset users. Existing approaches attempt to recover occluded facial expressions using additional sensors or internal cameras, but sensor-based methods increase device weight and discomfort, while camera-based methods raise privacy concerns and suffer from limited access to raw data. To overcome these limitations, we leverage the blendshape signals provided by commercial VR headsets as expression inputs. Our framework consists of three key components: (1) Blendshape Distribution Alignment (BDA), which applies linear regression to align the headset-provided blendshape distribution to a canonical input space; (2) an Expression Parameter Mapper (EPM) that maps the aligned blendshape signals into an expression parameter space for controlling Gaussian head avatars; and (3) a Mapper-integrated Avatar (MiA) that incorporates EPM into the avatar learning process to ensure distributional consistency. Furthermore, OFERA establishes an end-to-end pipeline that senses and maps expressions, updates Gaussian avatars, and renders them in real-time within VR environments. We show that EPM outperforms existing mapping methods on quantitative metrics, and we demonstrate through a user study that the full OFERA framework enhances expression fidelity while preserving avatar realism. By enabling real-time and photorealistic avatar expression control, OFERA significantly improves telepresence in VR communication. A project page is available at https://ysshwan147.github.io/projects/ofera/.
toXiv_bot_toot

The Raiders’ Week 18 win was basically a preseason opener: 3 overreactions https://raiderramble.com/2026/01/06/the-raiders-week-18-win-was-basically-a-preseason-opener-3-overreactions/

Agent's Take: Which path will Lamar Jackson take for a new Ravens deal? Josh Allen's or Dak Prescott's?

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/agents-take-lamar-jackson-r…

At the start of Donald Trump’s first term, he promised that he and his family would never do anything that might even be “perceived to be exploitive of office of the Presidency.”
By contrast, his second term looks rapacious.
He and members of his family have signed a blitz of foreign mega-deals shadowed by conflicts of interest,
and they’ve launched at least five different cryptocurrency enterprises,
all of which leverage Trump’s status as President to lure buyers o…

Trump’s Profiteering Hits $4 Billion
David D. Kirkpatrick takes the measure of how much the Trump family’s profits has increased President Donald Trump’s net worth after his first year back in office.

How tech worker activism has grown more cautious as companies crack down and once-privileged workers realize they don't have much leverage (Noam Scheiber/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/busines

Despite Crackdown on Activism, Tech Employees Are Still Picking Fights
They increasingly see themselves as rank-and-file workers who have traditional gripes with their companies.

Scaling Vision Transformers: Evaluating DeepSpeed for Image-Centric Workloads
Huy Trinh, Rebecca Ma, Zeqi Yu, Tahsin Reza
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.21081 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.21081 https://arxiv.org/html/2602.21081
arXiv:2602.21081v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in image processing tasks by utilizing self-attention mechanisms to capture global relationships within data. However, their scalability is hindered by significant computational and memory demands, especially for large-scale models with many parameters. This study aims to leverage DeepSpeed, a highly efficient distributed training framework that is commonly used for language models, to enhance the scalability and performance of ViTs. We evaluate intra- and inter-node training efficiency across multiple GPU configurations on various datasets like CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, exploring the impact of distributed data parallelism on training speed, communication overhead, and overall scalability (strong and weak scaling). By systematically varying software parameters, such as batch size and gradient accumulation, we identify key factors influencing performance of distributed training. The experiments in this study provide a foundational basis for applying DeepSpeed to image-related tasks. Future work will extend these investigations to deepen our understanding of DeepSpeed's limitations and explore strategies for optimizing distributed training pipelines for Vision Transformers.
toXiv_bot_toot

Workout of the day.

The UK CMA proposes measures to let publishers opt out of content scraping for Google's AI Overviews and AI training without losing visibility in search results (Robert Booth/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/jan

Screen, Match, and Cache: A Training-Free Causality-Consistent Reference Frame Framework for Human Animation
Jianan Wang, Nailei Hei, Li He, Huanzhen Wang, Aoxing Li, Haofen Wang, Yan Wang, Wenqiang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22160 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22160 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22160
arXiv:2601.22160v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Human animation aims to generate temporally coherent and visually consistent videos over long sequences, yet modeling long-range dependencies while preserving frame quality remains challenging. Inspired by the human ability to leverage past observations for interpreting ongoing actions, we propose FrameCache, a training-free three-stage framework consisting of Screen, Cache, and Match. In the Screen stage, a multi-dimensional, quality-aware mechanism with adaptive thresholds dynamically selects informative frames; the Cache stage maintains a reference pool using a dynamic replacement-hit strategy, preserving both diversity and relevance; and the Match stage extracts behavioral features to perform motion-consistent reference matching for coherent animation guidance. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks demonstrate that FrameCache consistently improves temporal coherence and visual stability while integrating seamlessly with diverse baselines. Despite these encouraging results, further analysis reveals that its effectiveness depends on baseline temporal reasoning and real-synthetic consistency, motivating future work on compatibility conditions and adaptive cache mechanisms. Code will be made publicly available.
toXiv_bot_toot

Kraken launches what it claims are the first regulated perpetual futures contracts based on tokenized stocks, available to non-US users and trading 24/7 (Krisztian Sandor/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/02/

Kraken brings crypto-style, 24/7 perpetuals trading for tokenized U.S. stocks
The crypto exchange is bringing U.S. stocks closer to the crypto world, letting users trade derivatives of tokenized stocks around-the-clock and with 20x leverage.

Raider Nation Chatter: Is Maxx Crosby following Josh Jacobs’ Raiders playbook? https://raiderramble.com/2026/02/24/raider-nation-chatter-is-maxx-crosby-following-josh-jacobs-raiders-playbook/

JUST-DUB-IT: Video Dubbing via Joint Audio-Visual Diffusion
Anthony Chen, Naomi Ken Korem, Tavi Halperin, Matan Ben Yosef, Urska Jelercic, Ofir Bibi, Or Patashnik, Daniel Cohen-Or
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22143 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.22143 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.22143
arXiv:2601.22143v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Audio-Visual Foundation Models, which are pretrained to jointly generate sound and visual content, have recently shown an unprecedented ability to model multi-modal generation and editing, opening new opportunities for downstream tasks. Among these tasks, video dubbing could greatly benefit from such priors, yet most existing solutions still rely on complex, task-specific pipelines that struggle in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce a single-model approach that adapts a foundational audio-video diffusion model for video-to-video dubbing via a lightweight LoRA. The LoRA enables the model to condition on an input audio-video while jointly generating translated audio and synchronized facial motion. To train this LoRA, we leverage the generative model itself to synthesize paired multilingual videos of the same speaker. Specifically, we generate multilingual videos with language switches within a single clip, and then inpaint the face and audio in each half to match the language of the other half. By leveraging the rich generative prior of the audio-visual model, our approach preserves speaker identity and lip synchronization while remaining robust to complex motion and real-world dynamics. We demonstrate that our approach produces high-quality dubbed videos with improved visual fidelity, lip synchronization, and robustness compared to existing dubbing pipelines.
toXiv_bot_toot

Unlocking online business potential doesn't have to be daunting! Simplify your journey by focusing on these three steps: identify your niche, leverage automated tools, and stay adaptable to trends. Remember, consistency is key to outshine the competition! 💡 Take charge and transform challenges into opportunities. #OnlineBusinessSuccess