Tootfinder

Fundamental Research Labs, which is working on AI applications in different fields, including a general-purpose consumer assistant, raised a $30M Series A (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/fund

Fundamental Research Labs nabs $30M to build AI agents across verticals | TechCrunch
Fundamental Research Labs is releasing multiple AI products related to gaming and productivity.

Calamus 20 I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing
What a heartaching poem of loneliness and the need for the love of another! Just wonderful. I understand now why this poem is so popular, particularly as a gay poem. It is full of meaning and is quite clear about it.
I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves, standing alone there, without its friend, its lover near—for I knew I could not
There's a more cerebral interpretation of this work, particularly if you understand "leaves" to mean "pages in my poetry book Leaves of Grass". Whitman talking about his own poetic inspiration from lovers.
Which well enough. But I'm more interested in Whitman's expressed need for "manly love". Which is clearly on his mind constantly:
my own dear friends ... I believe lately I think of little else than of them
Also Whitman's own eroticization of nature and himself. Here speaking of the tree,
its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself

Subzero Labs, which is building Rialo, a blockchain designed for non-crypto developers to build "real-world" apps, raised a $20M seed led by Pantera Capital (Ben Weiss/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/crypto/2025/08/01/subzero-labs-seed-r…

Subzero Labs raises $20 million to build a blockchain for the ‘real world’
Pantera Capital led the fundraise, with participation from Variant, Coinbase Ventures, and Susquehanna Crypto.

Towards LLM-Enhanced Product Line Scoping
Alexander Felfernig, Damian Garber, Viet-Man Le, Sebastian Lubos, Thi Ngoc Trang Tran
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23410 https://

Towards LLM-Enhanced Product Line Scoping
The idea of product line scoping is to identify the set of features and configurations that a product line should include, i.e., offer for configuration purposes. In this context, a major scoping task is to find a balance between commercial relevance and technical feasibility. Traditional product line scoping approaches rely on formal feature models and require a manual analysis which can be quite time-consuming. In this paper, we sketch how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be applied to suppor…

A controversial new book:
"We are eating the Earth"
says excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a long-term challenge resulting from an otherwise cheerful story,
in which more people live better lives with fuller bellies and bigger dreams.
Lawyer-turned-science-cop Tim Searchinger discovered that the popular carbon solution of 20 years ago,
-- plant-based biofuels,
-- was a disaster in the making.
His insight: Land used to grow fuel w…

There’s new hope that humans will save our planet
‘We Are Eating the Earth,’ argues for producing more food on less land to avert climate crisis.

Symmetry-protected conservation of superhorizon inflationary perturbations to all loops
Cheng-Jun Fang, Zhen-Hong Lyu, Chao Chen, Zong-Kuan Guo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00077

Symmetry-protected conservation of superhorizon inflationary perturbations to all loops
We demonstrates that the single-field inflation field system exhibits a symmetry that constrains its evolution via the Ward identity even for non-attractor inflation. By analyzing loop diagram structures, we derive a superhorizon conserved quantity directly related to the two-point correlation function of curvature perturbations, generalizing previous one-loop results to arbitrary loop orders. This symmetry-based approach provides a framework for understanding quantum conservation laws beyond t…

Please join me on July 7th for next month's MediaEd Club webinar for the Media Education Lab: "Privacy, Power, and Platforms"
https://mediaeducationlab.com/index.php/events/privacy-power-and-platforms
If you missed today's / this month…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03116 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@a…

Electron Penetration Acceleration in Turbulent Magnetic Loops
Using particle-in-cell simulations to study fast radio burst (FRB) propagation in a tenuous plasma, we identified a novel mechanism that occurs during the growth of turbulent magnetic loops: electron penetration acceleration. The loops have an electromagnetic left-hand chirality distinct from that of well-known quasistatic magnetic islands. The fast electrons penetrate through the loops and thus are accelerated to unexpected relativistic energies due to the symmetry breaking induced by the coup…

Last week, billionaire and onetime unofficial co-president Elon Musk ended his tenure as a special government employee after four months of spreading chaos, misery, and death throughout the federal government and world.
Much reporting has attributed his departure to philosophical differences with Trump.
Musk has criticized various Trump policies,
most recently the House GOP spending bill for adding trillions to the federal deficit.
But a crucial factor in Musk’s dep…

Tesla Takedown takes down Musk
Protest works.

Former CIA paramilitary officer Joe Kent
— who has said members of the Movement for Black Lives should be treated as terrorists, peddled conspiracy theories about the January 6 insurrection, and once earned the endorsement of white supremacist Nick Fuentes
— will be leading the National Counterterrorism Center.
Kent has most recently served as acting chief of staff for Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
He’s railed against Black Lives Matter protesters a…

Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theorist Who Likened BLM to Terrorists to Lead Counterterrorism Center
The Senate confirmed Joe Kent as director of the National Counterterrorism Center in a 52 to 44 vote.