Tootfinder

Digital bank Monzo, which has 13M UK customers, plans to launch a mobile phone service; Revolut and Klarna, each with ~11M UK customers, announced similar plans (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/1c6ce97e-f358-4249-b264-67c71b764164

In an email sent out to PBS station managers on Wednesday,
PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger announced that the organization plans to cut its budget by 21 percent
in order to offset some of the financial damage being caused by the Trump administration’s campaign to stop public media from receiving federal funding that was originally distributed by the CPB.
Because of the recently passed bill, PBS, NPR, and all of both organizations’ affiliates will no longer receive the $…

PBS is slashing its budget in response to Trump’s attack on public media
PBS plans to cut its budget by 21 percent as it braces for the financial fallout caused by Trump dismantling the CPB.

The News Movement is restructuring under a holding company called Caliber and plans to launch an app, SaySo, which will be "like Apple News but for creators" (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/news-movement-rebrand-caliber-sayso/
…

The News Movement Plans ‘Apple News for Creators,’ Rebrands Under Caliber
The holding company will house TNM, The Recount, Capsule, and Caliber Collective ahead of a 2026 app launch

49ers' Kittle: 'Fully plan' to return vs. Falcons https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/46619843/49ers-george-kittle-says-plans-return-sunday-vs-falcons

#anu

Australian National University walks back plans for forced redundancies as part of major restructure
The Australian National University abandons its plans for forced redundancies as part of its efforts to cut costs.

Dak Prescott plans campaign to keep George Pickens with Cowboys long term https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dak-prescott-plans-campaign-keep-george-pickens-dallas-cowboys-long-term

Hell or High Water: Evaluating Agentic Recovery from External Failures
Andrew Wang, Sophia Hager, Adi Asija, Daniel Khashabi, Nicholas Andrews
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11027 h…

Hell or High Water: Evaluating Agentic Recovery from External Failures
As language model agents are applied to real world problems of increasing complexity, they will be expected to formulate plans across large search spaces. If those plans fail for reasons beyond their control, how well do language agents search for alternative ways to achieve their goals? We devise a specialized agentic planning benchmark to study this question. Each planning problem is solved via combinations of function calls. The agent searches for relevant functions from a set of over four t…

FSB recruits terrorists! Russiaʼs attack plans in Ukraine and beyond | Weapons with @StarskyUA: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/17/fsb-recruits-terrorists-russias-attack.html

These are warning shots intended to intimidate Americans who stand against Trumpism.
He rules by edict and threat. un-American.
#nokings
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/18/us/arti…

Sources: Meta plans its fourth AI restructuring in six months, dividing Superintelligence Labs into TBD Lab, a product team, an infrastructure team, and FAIR (Kalley Huang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-plans-fourth…

Meta Plans Fourth Restructuring of AI Efforts in Six Months
Meta Platforms is planning the fourth restructuring of its artificial intelligence efforts in six months, according to three people familiar with the matter. Meta’s new AI organization, Meta Superintelligence Labs, is expected to be divided into four groups: a new lab that has been going by TBD ...

i bet the pundits are going to let openai get away with these implausible plans far longer than seems reasonable
https://www.wheresyoured.at/openai400bn/

OpenAI Needs $400 Billion In The Next 12 Months
Hello readers! This premium edition features a generous free intro because I like to try and get some of the info out there, but the real indepth stuff is below the cut. Nevertheless, I deeply appreciate anyone subscribing. On Monday I will have my biggest scoop ever, and it'll go

Mass protests erupt in Israel as IDF readies plans to occupy Gaza City (Washington Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/17/israel-protests-gaza-occupation/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250817/p24#a250817p24

All the #DZA - #Hasinger at the end of #ag2025goerlitz ... unfortunately the idiotic cellphone OS decided that this of all slides deserved only low resolution. :-(

“After four universities rejected the Trump administration’s compact for higher education, the White House is planning to meet Friday afternoon with the remaining five that have yet to respond.
The source with knowledge of the White House’s plans said that the meeting “appears to be an effort to regain momentum by threatening institutions to sign even though it’s obviously not in the schools’ interest to do so.”
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2025/10/17/white-house-meet-universities-regarding-compact

Wind in their sails: £750,000 grants boost for archives https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/about/news/wind-in-their-sails-750000-grants-boost-for-archives/

Wind in their sails: £750,000 grants boost for archives - The National Archives
Design plans for Titanic, sketches by Raymond Briggs and gig posters by Martin F. Bedford will all be more accessible thanks to cataloguing grants. Archives Revealed has just awarded more than £750,000 in 16 separate grants to archives across the UK. Recipients range from the Harland and Wolff Ship Plan Archive in Belfast to the […]

Is Ashton Jeanty playing today? Raiders' plans for rookie RB in preseason Week 2 https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/2025/08/16/ashton-jeanty-playing-status-today-raiders-49ers-preseason/85685014007/

Starging this Sunday, every single Toronto Public Library will be open on Sunday.
Thank you Olivia Chow for that
https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/city-hall/all-toronto-…

Finished “Abscond”, a short story by Abraham Verghese.
Rami, a teenage boy in 1967 knows what his mother intends for his life, slightly undermined by the tacit support he has from his father to pursue his passion.
While he dreams and makes secret plans for his future, a sudden event upends his family’s lives. Now he must play a new role and understand a new truth of the world. Bittersweet and very palpably present.
4/5 stars ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Abscond
Fate challenges a boy to find his place in the world in…

From @… 5 Things AM, August 18, 2025
More National Guard deployed to Washington, DC
#authoritarianism #PoliceState

Good Morning #Canada
I have one final chapter for The Dirt on Canadian Farming, and it's more of an opinion piece.
As I conducted research on each province for information on their agriculture, there were numerous news stories about how farmers and farm organizations were fighting against loss of farmland. Urban growth, new housing development, and sprawling industrial parks are gobbling up prime farmland. The attached article is just one example. The statistics released by each province have common trends:the average age of farmers increasing, individual farm operators in decline, larger farms are increasing, renting of farmland is growing, and overall arable land is in decline. With the sparsely populated prairies holding the majority of fertile farmland, Canada likely won't lose our global impact because of development for houses or industry. But elsewhere, our food chain will be pushed further away from where we live. Or disappear.
#CanadaIsAwesome #SaveOurFarmland
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/waterloo-region-new-update-wilmot-land-plans-1.7534644

Cité radieuse, mit Bar im 3., einer Chiropraxis im 4., einer Schule im 8. und ganz viel Linoleum-Charme der 50er (inklusive Einschreibeliste beim Concierge nicht nur für den Besuch, sondern für Bewohner auch für die „désinsectification“ der Sanitärbereiche für 60€). Jedes Gestaltungsdetail, jeder Abdruck der Schalbretts wohl Teil eines Plans - von der Dachterrasse mit dem kapellartigen Gemeinschaftsraum dann die Sicht auf weitere bauliche Ungetüme -…

Aboon, an AI-powered platform for financial advisers to help business owners launch and manage 401(k) plans, raised a $17.5M seed led by Bain Capital Ventures (Davis Janowski/WealthManagement.com)
https://www.wealthmanagement.com/advisor-s

Aboon Raises $17.5M to Streamline 401(k) Plans
AI-powered Aboon secures funding to help advisors create 401(k) plans for business clients in minutes instead of weeks.

Inspire or Predict? Exploring New Paradigms in Assisting Classical Planners with Large Language Models
Wenkai Yu, Jianhang Tang, Yang Zhang, Shanjiang Tang, Kebing Jin, Hankz Hankui Zhuo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11524

Inspire or Predict? Exploring New Paradigms in Assisting Classical Planners with Large Language Models
Addressing large-scale planning problems has become one of the central challenges in the planning community, deriving from the state-space explosion caused by growing objects and actions. Recently, researchers have explored the effectiveness of leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate helpful actions and states to prune the search space. However, prior works have largely overlooked integrating LLMs with domain-specific knowledge to ensure valid plans. In this paper, we propose a nove…

U.S. senators announced plans on Friday to force a vote on a resolution
to prevent military action against Venezuela without congressional authorization,
seeking to rein in Donald Trump's escalation of pressure on President Nicolas Maduro's government.
Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who is sponsoring the war powers resolution with fellow Democrat Adam Schiff of California and Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky,
said he was responding to the repeated U.S…

GB News plans to launch a DC bureau with live programming starting in September, including "The Late Show Live from DC", and aims to hire a US political editor (Charlotte Tobitt/Press Gazette)
https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/gb-new

GB News to broadcast nightly from US in 'huge moment' for channel
GB News is launching a bureau in Washington DC and hiring its first US political editor in a "huge moment" for the broadcaster.

PhysicalAgent: Towards General Cognitive Robotics with Foundation World Models
Artem Lykov, Jeffrin Sam, Hung Khang Nguyen, Vladislav Kozlovskiy, Yara Mahmoud, Valerii Serpiva, Miguel Altamirano Cabrera, Mikhail Konenkov, Dzmitry Tsetserukou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13903

PhysicalAgent: Towards General Cognitive Robotics with Foundation World Models
We introduce PhysicalAgent, an agentic framework for robotic manipulation that integrates iterative reasoning, diffusion-based video generation, and closed-loop execution. Given a textual instruction, our method generates short video demonstrations of candidate trajectories, executes them on the robot, and iteratively re-plans in response to failures. This approach enables robust recovery from execution errors. We evaluate PhysicalAgent across multiple perceptual modalities (egocentric, third-p…

Oh, did you think the israel model would be confined to the Middle East? Why should it? Didn’t all our Western governments just declare it kosher?
First, they came for the Palestinians… https://kolektiva.social/@DoomsdaysCW/115034832497483253

I agree that it’s better to be prepared than having to frantically try to find ways to cut costs. But it’s gonna be tough either way, since this comes at a time when universities are already struggling with massively reduced budgets.
And unlike what some administrators believe, “just get yourself another SNSF project” (to make up for a lack of structural funding), has never worked, and a dwindling acceptance rate definitely won’t help.

The years of a man's life are three score and ten.
I've done my time; I've served my sentence. Today is the day on which, for most of the past thirty years, I've planned to make my farewells and exit stage left, ideally not pursued by a bear.
But the best laid plans of meece and men gang of agley, especially when there's a goblin involved.
So I'm afraid I shall now be sticking around a while longer, to pester and provoke you all.
Here's to …

Zelensky confirms plans to meet Trump in Washington this week: https://benborges.xyz/2025/10/13/zelensky-confirms-plans-to-meet.html

Team Trump Is Actually Drawing Up Attack Plans for Mexico (Rolling Stone)
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/team-trump-mexico-cartels-military-attack-plans-1235407875/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250815/p31#a250815p31

Balanced Spanning Tree Distributions Have Separation Fairness
Harry Chen, Kamesh Munagala, Govind S. Sankar
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15137 https://arxiv.…

Balanced Spanning Tree Distributions Have Separation Fairness
Sampling-based methods such as ReCom are widely used to audit redistricting plans for fairness, with the balanced spanning tree distribution playing a central role since it favors compact, contiguous, and population-balanced districts. However, whether such samples are truly representative or exhibit hidden biases remains an open question. In this work, we introduce the notion of separation fairness, which asks whether adjacent geographic units are separated with at most a constant probability …

Sources: RB Breida to retire after 7 NFL seasons https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45975881/sources-rb-matt-breida-plans-retire-7-nfl-seasons

"SunCable to supply solar and storage to data centers by 2028"
#SolarPower #Energy #Renewables

SunCable to supply solar and storage to data centers by 2028
SunCable has confirmed its large-scale renewable and energy storage project in Australia’s Northern Territory could be operational before 2030, following a “pragmatic” reprioritization of initial plans.

X plans to show new info about accounts, including their creation date and which country they are based in, "starting next week" on select X employees' profiles (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/15/x-pl

X plans to show more information about user profiles to help improve trust | TechCrunch
X is working on new transparency features to help users identify who they’re interacting with, such as account creation date, location, username change history, and how each account uses the service.

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on KEXP's #VarietyMix
The Beths:
🎵 Best Laid Plans
#TheBeths
https://thebethsnz.bandcamp.com/track/best-laid-plans
https://open.spotify.com/track/00PTM6nT092jNL1GYKNd14

I would love to come to your social event, but I have a busy day ahead of me...

As Neil McInroy points out on bsky, this wouldn't have been necessary but for rentier land speculation stuffing the city centre and surroundings with concrete.
And that viaduct 'park' is a joke. To see it done properly, visit Paris and walk on the Greenway from Bastille towards Gare de Lyon.
Plans for 100-mile Manchester city centre walkways - BBC News

Plans for 100-mile Manchester city centre walkways
The £100m CyanLines initiative may see brightly-coloured walkways over canals and rivers.

U.S. to repatriate survivors of drug boat strike to Colombia, Ecuador
The United States plans to repatriate two alleged fishermen to Colombia and Ecuador after military forces attacked their vessel in the Caribbean on Thursday.

Facing questions about the legality of the strikes, the Trump administration has sought to justify the killings by claiming the U.S. is in “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels that are linked to Venezuelan President Nicolšs Maduro’s alleged e…

U.S. to repatriate survivors of drug boat strike to Colombia, Ecuador
It is unclear if the two surviving alleged drug smugglers have any links to Venezuelan criminal organizations.

Sources: Paramount Skydance plans to begin mass layoffs the week of October 27, cutting around 2,000 US jobs as part of its $2B cost-cutting initiative (Todd Spangler/Variety)
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/paramount-skydance-mass-layoffs-date-oct-2…

Paramount Skydance Mass Layoffs to Start Week of Oct. 27
Paramount Skydance will lay off about 2,000 U.S. employees under David Ellison's new management regime starting the week of Oct. 27.

Towards Reliable Multi-Agent Systems for Marketing Applications via Reflection, Memory, and Planning
Lorenzo Jaime Yu Flores, Junyi Shen, Xiaoyuan Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11120

Towards Reliable Multi-Agent Systems for Marketing Applications via Reflection, Memory, and Planning
Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enabled the development of AI agents that can plan and interact with tools to complete complex tasks. However, literature on their reliability in real-world applications remains limited. In this paper, we introduce a multi-agent framework for a marketing task: audience curation. To solve this, we introduce a framework called RAMP that iteratively plans, calls tools, verifies the output, and generates suggestions to improve the quality of the audie…

Odell Beckham has no plans to retire; free-agent WR has drawn interest from teams https://www.nfl.com/news/odell-beckham-has-no-plans-to-retire-free-agent-wr-has-drawn-interest-from-teams

Google plans to start using StopNCII's hashes to proactively identify nonconsensual images in search results and remove them (Terrence O'Brien/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/780852/google-stopncii-nonconsensual-intimate-imagery-has…

Google will use hashes to find and remove nonconsensual intimate imagery from Search
Google is partnering with StopNCII to combat nonconsensual images, but the company still lags behind much of the industry.

Thousands gathered in cities and towns across 34 states on Saturday
for a national day of protest against Republican redistricting plans in Texas and elsewhere.
“Fight the Trump Takeover”
was anchored in Austin, Texas,
with other sites spread nationwide.
In Austin alone, more than 5,000 protestors gathered at the city’s capitol in a show of defiance.
Videos and photos on social media showed protestors holding various signs that read:
“Abbott is a vot…

The 1 Thing Raiders Rookie RB Ashton Jeanty Needs https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/las-vegas-zamir-white-ashton-jeanty-washington-commanders-pete-carroll

Source: RedBird IMI has scrapped plans to acquire the production arm of ITV; Jeff Zucker says RedBird IMI is reluctant to invest in England due to regulations (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/438165e7-994c-4eff-a722-79bc7fff6900

Nvidia plans to invest £2B to support the UK's AI industry in partnership with Accel, Air Street Capital, Balderton Capital, Hoxton Ventures, and Phoenix Court (Olivia Solon/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09…

Thousands are expected to gather in cities and towns across 34 states on Saturday
for a national day of protest against Republican redistricting plans in Texas and elsewhere.
“Fight the Trump Takeover” will be anchored in Austin, Texas, with other sites spread nationwide.
“Texas House Democrats are blocking a redistricting vote in the Texas House right now to Stop the Trump Takeover,”
a website for the protests says.
“But Trump has made it clear that he’s not st…

Cowboys insider reveals whether team plans to sign Jadeveon Clowney https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-insider-reveals-whether-team-plans-sign-jadeveon-clowney

UK's FCA plans to exempt cryptoasset providers from some of its traditional finance rules, as it prepares to integrate the sector into its regulatory framework (Martin Arnold/Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/32e622ba-9d02-4ba5-bab0-e82facd4f849
…

Google updates its Search app's Discover page to let users follow specific publishers and creators; it plans to add YouTube Shorts and X and Instagram posts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/google-revamps-discover-pag…

Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators | TechCrunch
Google will now let you follow publishers and creators directly through its Search app's Discover page.

"UN urges nations to submit overdue climate plans 'as soon as possible' ahead of COP30"
#UN #UnitedNations #COP30

UN urges nations to submit overdue climate plans ahead of COP30
Most parties, including the EU, missed the February deadline to submit new climate plans, and pressure is mounting as the UN climate summit approaches.

In an email sent out to PBS station managers on Wednesday,
PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger announced that the organization plans to cut its budget by 21 percent
in order to offset some of the financial damage being caused by the Trump administration’s campaign to stop public media from receiving federal funding that was originally distributed by the CPB.
Because of the recently passed bill, PBS, NPR, and all of both organizations’ affiliates will no longer receive the $1…

PBS is slashing its budget in response to Trump’s attack on public media
PBS plans to cut its budget by 21 percent as it braces for the financial fallout caused by Trump dismantling the CPB.

Sources: Google plans to release Gemini 3 in December; it is expected to be more performant across the board, especially in coding and multimodal generation (Alex Heath/Sources)
https://sources.news/p/google-readies-gemini-3-perplexity

Google readies Gemini 3, Perplexity hits its goal
Reporting on Google's next model release and Perplexity's business. Also: AI job moves and some links.

Trump Plans To Pay ICE Officers And Border Patrol Agents Despite Shutdown, Memo Shows (Dave Jamieson/HuffPost)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-pay-immigration-agents-government-shutdown_n_68f12156e4b061265b2bfad0
http://www.memeorandum.com/251016/p74#a251016p74

Nexstar agrees to acquire Tegna for $3.54B in a deal valued at $6.2B including debt, expected to close by H2 2026; Nexstar plans to pay $22 per share (Kritika Lamba/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/en/tv-broadcaster-nexstar-acquire-rival-tegna-35…

Source: SoftBank's plans for a JV with OpenAI to bring AI to Japanese corporate customers are well behind schedule, with an update now expected in November (Yusuke Ogawa/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

Health insurance prices for next year under the Affordable Care Act
are now available in about a dozen states,
giving Americans their first look at the sharp increases many will pay for coverage
if Congress does not extend subsidies that have made some plans more affordable.
The annual enrollment period for Obamacare is expected to begin Nov. 1,
but the costs for some Americans are becoming publicly available piecemeal through some state marketplaces.
The…

Higher Obamacare Prices Become Public in a Dozen States
Consumers are facing greater costs for their 2026 A.C.A. health coverage as Congress continues to debate whether to extend subsidies that help people afford their premiums.

SoftBank's Vision Fund plans layoffs; sources say ~20% of staff will be impacted as SoftBank shifts resources to Masayoshi Son's large-scale AI bets in the US (Krystal Hu/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-

Canal takes a 34% stake in French cinema operator UGC, with the option to build a controlling stake in 2028, and says UGC's content library will expand its own (Jesse Whittock/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/10/canal-ugc-stake-secondary-listin…

Canal+ Buys Into French Cinema Chain UGC & Plans Secondary Listing In Johannesburg
Canal has bought a 34% stake in French cinema operator UGC, as the London-listed Euro giant announced plans for a secondary listing in South Africa.

Trump plans to leave his mark on Washington by building a Paris-like arch near the Lincoln Memorial (Darlene Superville/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-arch-lincoln-memorial-bridge-washington-ca88586c68a6301f87146a8ca2091b33
http://www.memeorandum.com/251016/p168#a251016p168

Donald Trump observed a few tents on public land and some garbage under an overpass.
Perturbed by the imagery, he issued a sweeping demand via his social media site, Truth Social:
“The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY.”
“We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump continued in his Sunday post. “Be prepared!”
The command came as he made plans to deploy 800 National Guard members to DC and temporarily federalize the city’s police department, …

DC’s homeless have nowhere to go. Trump might send them to jail.
The president's crackdown is causing fear and uncertainty among the city's unhoused and their advocates.

Sources: Chinese companies including Ant Group and JD.com pause plans to issue stablecoins in Hong Kong after instructions from regulators not to move ahead (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/8bc1fcfa-8c69-4de0-b6cb-ab6f7117558b

Robinhood has filed an application with the SEC to launch a new publicly traded fund called "Robinhood Ventures Fund I" that will hold shares of startups (Julie Bort/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/15/robinhood-pl…

Robinhood plans to launch a startups fund open to all retail investors  | TechCrunch
The “Robinhood Ventures Fund I” is intended to allow any retail investor to make money on startups, but the details are scant.

Google updates its Search app's Discover page to let users follow specific publishers and creators; it plans to add YouTube Shorts and X and Instagram posts (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/17/google-revamps-discover-pag…

Google revamps Discover page to show content from creators | TechCrunch
Google will now let you follow publishers and creators directly through its Search app's Discover page.

Automaker Stellantis and Pony.ai sign a non-binding agreement to develop robotaxis for deployment in Europe, with plans to start testing in the coming months (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/17/stellantis-teams-up-w…

Stellantis teams up with Pony AI to develop robotaxis in Europe  | TechCrunch
The collaboration will integrate Pony’s self-driving software into Stellantis’ electric medium-size van platform, which is built with advanced sensors to support autonomous vehicles.

Exclusive: Trump administration plans push at UN to restrict global asylum rights (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/trump-administration-plans-push-un-restrict-global-asylum-rights-2025-09-12/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250912/p52#a250912p52

Kevin Durant's Boardroom, a site focused on athletes and other entertainers, plans to launch a print magazine this month, with quarterly issues starting in 2026 (Daniel Kaplan/The Hollywood Reporter)
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business

Boardroom Plans Print Magazine Launch as Kevin Durant-Backed Start Up Branches Out
The company run by Rich Kleiman is testing the waters with a U.S. Open-themed cover feature in August and plans to publish quarterly beginning in 2026.

Nothing raised a $200M Series C led by Tiger Global at a $1.3B valuation, taking the total funding to $450M , and says it had $1B in total sales in early 2025 (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/15/nothing-cl…

Nothing closes $200M Series C led by Tiger Global, plans AI-first device launch | TechCrunch
Carl Pei's Nothing is raising $200 million in a Series C round from Tiger Global at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Sources: Indian digital payments company Pine Labs aims to raise as much as $700M from an IPO in the second half of October, down from an earlier $1B target (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-18/paypal…

House GOP eyes lawmaker security boost in bill to avert shutdown (Meredith Lee Hill/Politico)
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/14/house-gop-plans-lawmaker-security-boost-in-bill-to-avert-shutdown-00563253
http://www.memeorandum.com/250914/p32#a250914p32

Disney and Webtoon announce a new digital platform with 35K Disney comics; Disney plans to acquire a 2% equity interest in Webtoon; WBTN jumps 70% after hours (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-15/d…

A live blog of Meta Connect 2025, where "Hypernova" smart glasses with a display, new Meta Ray-Ban glasses, Meta AI updates, and more are expected (Devindra Hardawar/Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-connec

Meta Connect 2025 live updates: Gearing up for 'Hypernova' smart glasses with displays
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is kicking off Meta Connect 2025 with a keynote tonight, where we'll likely hear more a ton more about his plans for smart frames...

"You’re only asking for trouble,”
said Charles Massimo, a Long Island, New York-based financial advisor and senior vice president at Wealth Enhancement. 
Pros and cons of private assets in 401(k)s
Retirement plans represent a significant market.
Defined-contribution workplace plans
— which include 401(k)s and 403(b) plans, among others
— held $12.2 trillion as of the end of the first quarter of 2025, according to the Investment Company Institute, a tr…

What private assets in 401(k) plans mean for investors: 'You’re only asking for trouble,' one advisor says
Millions of investors may soon have access to private assets in their 401(k) or other workplace retirement plans. What to know about the risks and rewards.

When the military is deployed to quell overwhelmingly peaceful protest,
when elected officials of the opposing party are arrested or handcuffed,
when student activists are jailed and deported,
and when a wide range of civic institutions
– non-profits, law firms, universities, news outlets, the arts, the civil service, scientists
– are targeted and penalized by the federal government,
it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that our core freedoms are disappea…

CNN plans to launch its All Access streaming subscription tier on October 28 for $6.99 per month or $69.99 per year in the US (Ted Johnson/Deadline)
https://deadline.com/2025/10/cnn-subscription-service-launch-1236588685/

CNN’s Subscription Service To Launch October 28 At $6.99 Per Month
CNN is making another go of it with a subscription service, announcing an Oct. 28 launch for its “all access” service at a price of $6.99 per month. Subscribers will have access to live and on demand content, as well as digital journalism.  “It’s an essential step in CNN’s evolution as we work to give […]

YouTube plans to expand its likeness detection tech to all Partner Program creators in the next months; creators can opt in by uploading an image of their face (Kerry Flynn/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/16/youtube-ai-likeness-detection-deepfakes

YouTube expands likeness detection to all creators
The tool helps creators manage AI-generated videos.

Disney and Webtoon announce a new digital platform with 35K Disney comics; Disney plans to acquire a 2% equity interest in Webtoon; WBTN jumps 70% after hours (Sohee Kim/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-15/d…

Trump and the Pentagon are considering creating a full-time
“Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force”
that could be called on to
quash civil unrest and protest at a moment’s notice,
according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
The force would be made up of about 600 National Guards troops,
half of which would be based on military bases in Alabama and Arizona,
ready at all times to fly into any given city or state to lay do…

Trump Plans Military “Reaction Force” to Use Against Americans
A disturbing new report reveals how Trump wants to use the military to crush civil unrest.

Source: StubHub now aims to hold its IPO in September after pausing plans in April; it updated its IPO prospectus, reporting Q1 revenue up 10% YoY to $397.6M (CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/stubhub-ipo-back-on-for-september-a…

StubHub IPO is back on for September after ticketing company delayed plans on tariff concerns
StubHub updated its IPO prospectus on Monday, effectively restarting the process to go public.

Meta plans new Instagram teen safety tools in 2026, letting parents block teens from chatting with AI characters and sending them "insights" from teens' chats (Robert Hart/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/801505/meta-ai-chatbot-parental-…

Meta is adding more parental controls for teen AI use
Meta said it will let parents block teens from speaking with AI chatbots on Instagram or give them a summary of conversation topics, but not until next year. 

Uber plans to launch data labelling tasks in the US for some drivers to earn extra money, appearing under "digital tasks" in the driver app, later this fall (Natalie Lung/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sources: Micron plans to stop selling server chips to data centers in China after a 2023 ban, but will continue selling chips to auto and smartphone sectors (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transp…

Sources: CME Group plans to debut financial contracts tied to sports games and economic indicators by the end of 2025, including through its FanDuel partnership (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-16/cm…

OpenAI says it is developing a "different ChatGPT experience" for teens and plans to use age-prediction tech to bar kids under 18 from the standard version (Megan Morrone/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/16/chatgpt-for-teens-openai-parents

OpenAI is building a ChatGPT for teens
The new version seeks to limit the potential for harm to minors.

Digital banking group NOBA plans to list on Nasdaq Stockholm in Q3 2025, in a deal expected to value the company at around $3.74B (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/digital-bank-noba-plans-sweden-ipo-valuing-firm…

Google plans to invest $9B in South Carolina through 2027 to scale up its Berkeley County data center campus and support building two sites in Dorchester County (Kimberley Kao/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/…

Internal memo: in a first, Samsung plans to award shares and bonuses based on stock price to employees and will let staff get up to 50% of their payout in stock (Yoolim Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Signal announces a backup feature that includes 100MB of storage for texts and the last 45 days' worth of media for free, or 100GB of storage for $1.99/month (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/08/signal-introduces-free-an…

Signal introduces free and paid backup plans for your chats | TechCrunch
Signal introduces backups with both free and paid plans.

At the White House dinner, Zuckerberg said Meta plans to spend "something like at least $600B" through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the US (Kalley Huang/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/meta…

Meta Plans to Spend $600 Billion Through 2028 in the U.S., Zuckerberg Says
Meta Platforms plans to spend “something like at least $600 billion” through 2028 on data centers and other infrastructure in the U.S., Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Thursday at a dinner with President Donald Trump and other technology executives. In July, Meta estimated its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $66 billion and $72 billion, up at least 68% from its capital

Sources: Dario Amodei is in India as Anthropic plans a Bengaluru office and explores a partnership with Reliance, seeking to expand in its second-largest market (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/07/anthropic-…

Anthropic plans to open India office, eyes tie-up with billionaire Ambani | TechCrunch
Anthropic's next big bet is India — one of its fastest-growing markets worldwide.

Mastodon plans to add Bluesky-like starter packs to suggest accounts to follow for new users, but will allow accounts to opt out of being included in Packs (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/07/mastodon-is-taki…

Mastodon is taking cues from Bluesky with plans for its own starter 'Packs' | TechCrunch
Mastodon is planning to make it easier for newcomers to discover curated collections of users to follow by launching a new starter packs feature.

Amazon plans to hold its 2025 Prime Big Deal Days from October 7 at 12:01am PT through October 8, exclusive to Prime subscribers (Brandon Russell/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/news/774151/amazon-october-prime-day-fall-dates-2025

Amazon’s next Prime Day sale is happening on October 7th
Amazon’s October Prime Day 2025 will kick off on Tuesday, October 7th through October 9th. Here’s everything you need to know about the two-day event.

Google plans to invest £5B in the UK on AI, energy, R&D, and more over the next two years, and expects to add 8,000 jobs a year at businesses across the country (Mauro Orru/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/google-pledges-nearly-7-bi…

Roblox plans to restrict unrated experiences to devs, automatically remove servers with violative content, and limit some social hangouts to verified 17 users (Matt Kaufman/Roblox Corporate)
https://corp.roblox.com/newsroom/2025/08/extending-r…

Clarifying Our Policy on Romantic and Sexual Content
Clarifying Our Policy on Romantic and Sexual Content

GiveDirectly plans to pilot a program using Google's AI-based Flood Hub, which provides forecast warnings, to send early aid to at-risk families in Bangladesh (Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/google-flood-hub-cash-aid/

AI flood forecasting allows aid to reach farmers before disaster strikes
Using Google’s Flood Hub, nonprofit trial program sends early warning and unconditional cash to workers.

Sam Altman says OpenAI "totally screwed up some things" on the GPT-5 rollout, confirms plans to fund a brain-computer interface startup to rival Neuralink (Alex Heath/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/command-line-news

I talked to Sam Altman about the GPT-5 launch fiasco
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addressed criticism of GPT-5’s rollout, the AI bubble, launching a social network and brain-computer interface, buying Google Chrome, and more.

Sources: Rakuten began considering a US IPO of its credit card business after SoftBank announced plans to launch an IPO for its mobile payment app PayPay (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/japans-rakuten-wei…

Anthropic says Haiku 4.5 can serve as a subagent for Sonnet 4.5, which can break down problems into multistep plans and orchestrate a team of Haiku 4.5 agents (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-haiku-4-5

Introducing Claude Haiku 4.5
Claude Haiku 4.5, our latest small model, is available today to all users.

Indian startup Kuku, which offers audio content and vertical dramas, raised an $85M Series C led by Granite at a $500M valuation and has 10M paid subscribers (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/15/indias-kuku-snags-85m-as-mobil…

India's Kuku snags $85M as mobile content wars intensify | TechCrunch
Kuku plans to expand beyond India with a U.S. launch slated for next year.