Tootfinder

Dis Bilbo, c'était quoi ton moment préféré ?
Y en a un paquet, évidemment, mais il y a ce moment après le troisième contact quand la pression retombe, que les gens autour sont béats et joyeux. Et ce petit rituel du selfie solaire instauré il y a 20 ans dans le désert égyptien. Un moment de partage avec tous les voisins qui sont repartis avec un croissant de soleil en projection sur leur t-shirt ou dans la main. C'était chouette, vraiment...

Film and TV advocates and execs visited Washington, DC, on Wednesday to lobby for a federal production tax credit, ahead of an election recess for the US House (Katie Kilkenny/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Netflix, Universal Chiefs Descend On D.C. to Capitalize on Trump Tax Credit Momentum
Ted Sarandos and Donna Langley along with SAG-AFTRA president Sean Astin and more execs convened in Washington to lobby Congress to push through an incentive this year.

Nick Blair, a 40-year-old former football agent, and son of ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair,
is seeking funding for a military technology startup called “Pyra”
to the tune of 200 million dollars.
It’s not clear what, exactly, Pyra needs all that money to do:
its website only says “Deploying Summer 2026…Stand By.”
Blair is at the moment the only active officer of the company, according to UK government filings.
In an article published this week, an unnamed sour…

Tony Blair's son is launching yet another military tech company
Nick Blair is seeking $200 million for a project with no product.

"At a moment when the living world has been deeply imperiled, I wanted to make my biggest, boldest attempt at showing why it matters—why it all matters, and especially the parts that lie outside our normal experiences."
--Ed Yong, email talking about an upcoming book about ALL LIFE: "Life Beyond Measure"
#GreatWriting

Sharp proper estimation of fixed-component Gaussian location mixtures in polynomial time
Hengzhi He, Guang Cheng
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12701 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12701 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12701
arXiv:2608.12701v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We consider a mixture of at most $k$ unit-covariance Gaussians in $\mathbb{R}^d$ whose means belong to a fixed-radius ball, with no separation or minimum-weight condition. Doss, Wu, Yang and Zhou (2023) proved that the minimax Hellinger risk is of order $\sqrt{d/n}\wedge 1$ and constructed a proper polynomial-time estimator with the slower general bound $(d/n)^{1/4}$; obtaining the sharp rate in polynomial time for fixed $k\geq 3$ was left open. We resolve this question. The key device is a moment-fiber range finder. A second-moment subspace controls the energy missed by projection. We then estimate finitely many one-free-index Hermite contractions. These vector-valued contractions recover every tensor component containing exactly one missed direction at the sharp $\sqrt{d/n}$ scale. Every remaining term contains at least two missed factors and is therefore controlled by the residual second-moment energy. The resulting subspace has dimension depending only on $k$. Exhaustive moment fitting in this constant-dimensional space produces a proper mixture and, together with the dimension-free moment characterization of Gaussian mixtures, achieves the optimal Hellinger rate in polynomial arithmetic time for every fixed $k$.
toXiv_bot_toot

Current and former OpenAI employees say pressure to quickly ship products left less time for safety, contributing to incidents like the rogue agent hack (Maxwell Zeff/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-safety-security-ai-agents-culture/

The Safety Reckoning Inside OpenAI
OpenAI’s rogue agent hack was a watershed moment for AI safety and cybersecurity. It also sparked internal questions about the culture that led to it.

Kiez-Moment: Garten Eden im Wedding https://weddingweiser.de/kiez-moment-paradies-wedding/

🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭
Und noch etwas:
Bitte unterzeichnen.
Im Moment brauchen wir alles andere, als noch ein riskantes Unternehmen mit unabsehbaren Folgen!
Danke.
🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭 🇨🇭
https://www.lebensmittelschutz.ch/protestbrief-danke

Protestbrief: NEIN zu Gentech-Schweinen in der Schweiz! — Lebensmittel schützen!

Central bankers in economies including the US, Japan and the UK will face a moment of truth this week,
as surging inflation raises the prospect of higher interest rates.
Policymakers in all three countries will set rates in the next seven days
against the backdrop of turbulent global bond markets.
In particular, investors will be watching closely to see if Kevin Warsh, the new chair of the US Federal Reserve,
can face down Donald Trump’s demands for rate cuts an…

Surging inflation puts interest rates back in focus as policymakers meet in Japan, US and UK
Iran war and turbulent global bond markets add to pressure as rate decisions loom this week in major western economies

Three years ago, the Defense Department led an ambitious international effort to better protect civilians during combat,
a movement built on the bloody lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The Pentagon created a network with European partners,
driving the creation of shared standards.
Civilian harm experts described the moment as a “unique opportunity” for American leadership by example.
Today, those efforts continue
— without the United States,
after De…

Empty Seat: U.S. Absent as Western Powers Meet on Wartime Protections for Civilians
A multinational group meets this week at NATO headquarters in Belgium to discuss protections for civilians during combat. Even though the U.S. co-founded this effort, no American delegation will be in the room.