Tootfinder

AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup Sword Health raised $40M led by General Catalyst at a $4B valuation, up from its $3B valuation from June 2024 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/sword-h…

Sword Health nabs $40M at $4B valuation, pushes IPO plans to at least 2028 | TechCrunch
The digital health startup says it secured the fresh capital to update its valuation and finance acquisitions.

How Walmart plans to leverage its $2.3B Vizio acquisition to push shoppable TV experiences; Walmart's ad business had just $4.4B of sales in FY 2025 (Jaewon Kang/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Sources: lobbyists for Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta back a campaign for a 10-year US state AI regulation ban, a move dividing the AI industry and the GOP (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/52ae52f1-531e-462f-898f-e9f86b3b1869

Big Tech pushes for 10-year ban on US states regulating AI
Call by Amazon, Google and Microsoft lobbyists for a ‘moratorium’ has split industry and the Republican party

Xi Pushes to Deepen Central Asia Influence With Kazakh Visit (Nariman Gizitdinov/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-15/xi-takes-push-for-global-sway-to-central-asia-with-kazakh-visit
http://www.memeorandum.com/250616/p18#a250616p18

FPGA & VPU Co-Processing in Space Applications: Development and Testing with DSP/AI Benchmarks
Vasileios Leon, Charalampos Bezaitis, George Lentaris, Dimitrios Soudris, Dionysios Reisis, Elissaios-Alexios Papatheofanous, Angelos Kyriakos, Aubrey Dunne, Arne Samuelsson, David Steenari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12968

FPGA & VPU Co-Processing in Space Applications: Development and Testing with DSP/AI Benchmarks
The advent of computationally demanding algorithms and high data rate instruments in new space applications pushes the space industry to explore disruptive solutions for on-board data processing. We examine heterogeneous computing architectures involving high-performance and low-power commercial SoCs. The current paper implements an FPGA with VPU co-processing architecture utilizing the CIF & LCD interfaces for I/O data transfers. A Kintex FPGA serves as our framing processor and heritage accel…

How Walmart plans to leverage its $2.3B Vizio acquisition to push shoppable TV experiences; Walmart's ad business had just $4.4B of sales in FY 2025 (Jaewon Kang/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

UK cyber agency pushes for 'strategic policy agenda' as government efforts stall https://therecord.media/ncsc-pushes-uk-government-create-strategic-cyber-policy-agenda

TikTok rolls out new AI ad features, including the ability for marketers to use text or images to create AI-generated video, as part of its Symphony ad suite (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

"This so-called big, beautiful bill pushes 16 million people off of health care and literally takes food from the mouths of hungry children. An enormous tax cut for the very wealthiest is the definition of an immoral bill," said Sen. Coons, a Presbyterian and graduate of Yale Divinity School.

Episcopalians join other faith leaders, lawmakers, in DC rally against budget bill
[Religion News Service – Washington] Religious leaders are ramping up pressure on lawmakers to reject the Republican-led budget bill currently before the U.S. Senate, arguing proposed cuts to healt…

TikTok rolls out new AI ad features, including the ability for marketers to use text or images to create AI-generated video, as part of its Symphony ad suite (Kurt Wagner/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

The modern standard model of cosmology is a triumph of the scientific process.
On the other hand, it’s also kind of a kludge.
The modern standard model seems to glue together a bunch of disparate parts without any overarching theoretical structure.
Take inflation and dark energy.
In both cases, we have a form of pervasive energy that pushes space apart.
Inflation does it really fast and then dissipates.
Dark energy does it much slower and does not dissipate…

Our standard model of cosmology is both a triumph and a jumbled mess
The standard model of cosmology is very successful, but cosmologists are largely still in the dark about the forces that drive the Universe.

“I do not design with Figma. He who designs with Figma has forgotten the face of his father. I design with my eye.
I do not code with an IDE. He who codes with his IDE has forgotten the face of his father. I code with my mind.
I do not push to staging. He who pushes to staging has forgotten the face of his father. I push to prod.”
--The Gunslinger, if Stephen King was full stack
#tech

'Before there's nothing left': Trump pushes Iran to make nuclear deal; live updates (Zac Anderson/USA Today)
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/13/iran-israel-trump-nuclear-deal-live-updates/84182138007/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250613/p33#a250613p33

Sacha Baron Cohen - Charlie Chaplin Britannia Award - pushes woman in wheelchair off stage at awards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7zF98VDxED4

Yay, @… made it so :gitannex: #gitAnnex pushes the current branch first (not the git-annex or synced/* branches). This is awesome when you want to push-to-create a local repo to your @…

AgentPorn.ai - Where Developers get their fix
https://agentporn.ai/

Exclusive: US pushes countries for best offers by Wednesday as tariff deadline looms (Jarrett Renshaw/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/us-pushes-countries-best-offers-by-wednesday-tariff-deadline-looms-2025-06-02/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250602/p106#a250602p106

The Scotsman who helped the Eagles perfect the tush push: 'Nobody else is doing what I do' https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6390145/2025/06/05/richie-gray-interview-tush-push-nfl/

Trump's ego pushes the narrative that he's somehow a good negotiator & 'gets the best deals' from other countries.
Problem: 6 bankruptcies & no one's left that will lend him money. He only knows how to negotiate w/ dumb blunt instruments: Bribes & Tariffs.
Result: Zero actual trade agreements.

"What is different, is that before what were largely fringe anti-Semitic and white supremacist theories floating around the far corners of the Alt-Right, have now become the backbone of the Republican party. 'The Great Replacement,' once a conspiracy pushed by only hardline neo-Nazis and white supremacists, is now being touted by everyone from pharma billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, Swason frozen foods heir and Twitter troll Tucker Carlson, to the billionaire backed Turning Point US…

A profile of prediction market Kalshi, which is using its federal financial license to open up sports gambling across the US, even in states where it is illegal (Justina Lee/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/20

Kalshi Pushes Sports Betting as Trump, Deregulation Boosts Prediction Market
Armed with a federal license and allies in Trumpworld, the tech start-up is pushing prediction markets across America into a legal gray zone: sports betting.

White House Pushes Texas to Redistrict, Hoping to Blunt Democratic Gains (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/us/politics/trump-texas-redistricting.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/250610/p4#a250610p4

techno-political rant
Say what you want about using the right tool for each problem, but there are tools that suck no matter what.
I'm tired of people portraying legit technical criticism as "biased" and "religious", while at the same time they present themselves as tolerant and open-minded (spoiler: for the most part, they aren't).
Almost every day of my life I have to deal with the nasty consequences of ultra-dumb decisions made by the very same people who are obsessed with productivity and criticise all day long whoever pushes for any design that shows any minim amount of care and/or deep thought (mostly via strawmen arguments).
And, of course, unironically: this has a lot to do with capitalism, as many of our other social and economic problems.
They arrive, have a strike of super-productivity for a few weeks/months and then use that as a trampoline to raise through the ranks or abandon ship before having to face the consequences of their technical crimes.
Then others arrive and are obviously slower at that same job... so the uneducated observers start believing that these newcomers aren't as good as the class traitors who wrote the initial nasty code.
To make things worse, if any of these newcomers dare to speak openly about introducing good practices... this ends up creating a new mental association (in the minds of uneducated observers) between "good engineering" and "lack of productivity".
The ones trying to fix the mess are indeed slower, not because they try to do things the right way though, but because they have to waste vasts amounts of time fixing what is objectively broken besides doing the "visible" work.
Most of today's established "super-productive" ones, if they were starting today, would be probably "vibe coders", certainly not what we commonly understand as a programmer. Not because AI-coding is the future, but because they never cared about the trade at all. They were here only for the grift.

Universal Phase Transitions of Matter Induced in Optically Driven Cavities
Tsan Huang, Zhiyuan Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24318 https://

Universal Phase Transitions of Matter Induced in Optically Driven Cavities
Optical cavities have been widely applied to manipulate the properties of solid state materials inside it. We propose that in systems embedded within optical cavities driven by incident pump light, the pump induces generic phase transitions into new non-equilibrium steady states. This effect arises from the ponderomotive potential, the effective static potential exerted by the pump on the low energy degrees of freedom, which exhibits a universal step-like structure that pushes the matter degree…

Vance jokingly pushes back on 'intellectual' label: 'You insult me' (Sarah Fortinsky/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5331977-vice-president-jd-vance-intellectual-label/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250604/p54#a250604p54

Joni Ernst's "we're all going to die" pushes MAGA's toxic Christian compassion on us all (Amanda Marcotte/Salon)
https://www.salon.com/2025/06/04/joni-ernsts-were-all-going-to-die-exposes-magas-christian-compassion/
http://www.memeorandum.com/250604/p113#a250604p113

Trump pushes a July 4th deadline for big tax bill as senators dig in (Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/trump-big-bill-senate-gop-debt-a0679756c6af762ac0291be6cb647145
http://www.memeorandum.com/250603/p98#a250603p98