Tootfinder

Sources: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus, which is building AI for manufacturing computers, cars, and spacecraft, has acquired agentic AI startup General Agents (Paresh Dave/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-new-ai-company-acquired-age…

Jeff Bezos’ New AI Venture Quietly Acquired an Agentic Computing Startup
Project Prometheus has raised over $6 billion in funding and hired over 100 employees, a handful of whom joined through its acquisition of General Agents, according to records and sources.

OVH claims that they use a "quantum computer" to improve their SSL security. I'm not gonna complain about the marketing term SSL, but... no, a quantum RNG is not a quantum computer. It's also... something that has been around for decades. And QRNGs don't do anything useful. That doesn't stop some companies from selling them for a lot of money.

Have you ever wondered to what extend LLMs are used to support writing of scientific publications? Here is a chart indicating the fraction of LLM-modified sentences in scientific publications over time.
c.f. Liang et al, Mapping the Increasing Use of LLMs in Scientific Papers (2024)
https://arxiv.org/html/2404.01268v1

The EU could “respond swiftly and decisively” against th
“unjustified” US visa bans on five Europeans involved in combating online hate and disinformation,
a European Commission spokesperson has said.
European leaders including Emmanuel Macron accused Washington of
“coercion and intimidation”,
after the visa ban on the figures who have been at the heart of campaigns to introduce laws regulating American tech companies.
Justifying the visa bans, the US secr…

Dispersion-Aware Modeling Framework for Parallel Optical Computing
Ziqi Wei, Yuanjian Wan, Yuhu Cheng, Xiao Yu, Peng Xie
https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18897 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.18897 https://arxiv.org/html/2511.18897
arXiv:2511.18897v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Optical computing represents a groundbreaking technology that leverages the unique properties of photons, with innate parallelism standing as its most compelling advantage. Parallel optical computing like cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) based offers powerful computational capabilities but also introduces new challenges, particularly concerning dispersion due to the introduction of new frequencies. In this work, we extend existing theories of cascaded MZI systems to develop a generalized model tailored for wavelength-multiplexed parallel optical computing. Our comprehensive model incorporates component dispersion characteristics into a wavelength-dependent transfer matrix framework and is experimentally validated. We propose a computationally efficient compensation strategy that reduces global dispersion error within a 40 nm range from 0.22 to 0.039 using edge-spectrum calibration. This work establishes a fundamental framework for dispersion-aware model and error correction in MZI-based parallel optical computing chips, advancing the reliability of multi-wavelength photonic processors.
toXiv_bot_toot

The Second Ball Podcast
A show dedicated to the Australian Championship and NPL Football competitions...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/the-second-ball/

The silicon valley really likes authoritarian regimes i guess//
Why these companies insist on a 72-hour workweek - The Washington Post https://apple.news/AVeZH8xniTTWl9084nKQ5BA

Why these companies insist on a 72-hour workweek — The Washington Post
Start-ups are promoting hardcore cultures such as “996,” meaning working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, as they race to compete in AI.

Sources: ByteDance bought more Nvidia chips than any other Chinese company in 2025, but Chinese regulators now block it from using the chips in new data centers (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/china-slowly-surely-breaking-…

China Is Slowly but Surely Breaking Free From Nvidia
ByteDance bought more Nvidia chips than any other Chinese company in 2025, according to three people with direct knowledge of its purchases. Racing to secure computing power for its billion-plus users and fearing Washington might suddenly cut off supply, the TikTok parent hoarded its stock of ...

Beijing-based DP Technology, which develops AI tools used by researchers for tasks like computer-aided drug design and battery design, raised a ~$114M Series C (Eunice Xu/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/business/companies/ar

AI-for-Science start-up DP Technology raises US$114 million in Series C round
The Beijing-based AI-for-Science firm said the Series C round would fund hiring and R&D, as interest grows in using AI to speed up scientific discovery.

IBM says it was able to run a key quantum computing algorithm in real-time on commonly available field programmable gate array chips made by AMD (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/ibm-says-key-quantum…