Tootfinder

Source: Elastic has agreed to acquire the AI site reliability engineering startup Deductive AI for up to $85M; CRV led Deductive AI's $7.5M seed round in 2025 (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/18/source-elastic-…

Source: Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed DeductiveAI for up to $85M | TechCrunch
DeductiveAI, a startup that uses AI to catch and resolve bugs in software, was founded just three years ago.

Trump has described a potential multibillion-dollar weapons sale to Taiwan as a “negotiating chip” with China,
raising new doubts about the pace and scale of American military support for the island democracy.
Taiwan’s government has been waiting for months for Mr. Trump to sign off on a $14 billion package of missiles, anti-drone equipment and air-defense systems intended to fortify the island against Beijing’s military threats.
Trump himself had pressured Taiwan to spend …

Trump Uses Taiwan Arms Sales as Bargaining Chip With China, in a Risky Move
The president said a potential arms deal for Taiwan was a “very good negotiating chip” in talks with Beijing. His words raise questions about the reliability of U.S. support.

Sources: Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained infrastructure and triggered a series of reliability issues (Ashley Stewart/Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-amazon-ai-cloud-capacity-2026-6

GitHub's AI surge pushes Microsoft into Amazon's arms
Microsoft is adding AWS capacity to GitHub after AI-driven growth strained infrastructure and triggered a series of reliability issues.

Also worth noting that cellular/mobile phones still provided an actual working service.
Yes there were trade-offs, but the core functions that people wanted were there.
https://beige.party/@FeloniousPunk/116573505276924676

I don't know much about site or server hosting, but I got this message from one of my providers this morning.
My site (just for content aggregation and not publicly viewable) is down for *8* hours.
Couldn't they have handled the transition without this kind of downtime?
"As part of our ongoing commitment to improve reliability and prepare for future enhancements, we will be migrating all New York City customers to our new and upgraded platform in Salt Lake City…

Pramaana Labs, which uses the LEAN programming language to build a deterministic verification layer on top of LLMs, raised a $27M seed led by Khosla Ventures (Russell Brandom/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/pram

Pramaana Labs raises $27M seed round from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI | TechCrunch
Pramaana will focus on highly sensitive verticals like law, drug discovery, and tax preparation — where errors can be costly and reliability is at a premium.

Spatial transcriptomics on an expanded dataset at the brain-electrode interface: exploration of variability and identification of novel biomarkers https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2026.1852774/full "…

Frontiers | Spatial transcriptomics on an expanded dataset at the brain-electrode interface: exploration of variability and identification of novel biomarkers
The foreign body reaction to implanted electrodes in the brain has long been recognized as a major challenge impacting the performance and reliability of ind...

Accepting that I blame the companies and not the workers, has anyone noticed that residential shipping reliability in NYC has fallen off a cliff?

Nvidia and Microsoft Researchers Say AI Agents Don't Care About Safety or Reliability https://www.404media.co/nvidia-and-microsoft-researchers-say-ai-agents-dont-care-about-safety-or-reliability/

Ad tech company Viant partners with Ad Fontes Media to help advertisers target connected-TV news inventory based on scoring of political bias and reliability (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/convergent-tv/viant-ad-fontes-media-bias-reli…

Viant Taps Ad Fontes Media to Bring ‘News Bias’ Targeting to CTV
The integration scores news programs on reliability and bias, giving buyers a more granular way to activate against inventory

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal.
— by @…
🔐

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe MTCs are worth pursuing as a key to a post-quantum future. An increasingly urgent problem For much of the last several years, the conversation about post-quantum cryptograp…

93 % of battery-electric truck users in Germany are (very) satisfied with the vehicle, @… survey finds.
Favorable road toll, low energy costs for depot charging and high reliability are seen as biggest advantages.

93% of battery-electric truck users are highly satisfied - electrive.com
The German Oeko-Institut surveyed 57 transport companies in Germany that have been using heavy-duty electric trucks in daily operations for at least one year.

from my link log —
What the Code of Hammurabi can teach us about software liability.
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/what-the-code-of-hammurabi-can-teach-us-about-hardware-and-software-liability/
saved 2019…

What The Code of Hammurabi Can Teach Us About Hardware and Software Liability
The Information Security community has been debating software reliability for decades. Some say software is too advanced to place guarantees on it. And others s

TransLink is continuing to modernize SkyTrain stations and improve accessibility across the system. Later this month, elevators will be replaced at Burrard and Royal Oak stations on the Expo Line; while escalator replacement work starts at Gilmore and Production Way–University stations on the Millennium Line.

These upgrades are replacing decades-old equipment with new infrastructure designed to reduce disruptions and ensure service reliability. Additional staff and signage will b…

Discover the power of property-based testing in R with the #quickcheck package! Seamlessly integrates with #testthat and offers a variety of generators for atomic vectors, lists, and tibbles. Perfect for ensuring your code's reliability. Check it out:

GitHub - armcn/quickcheck: Property Based Testing in R
Property Based Testing in R. Contribute to armcn/quickcheck development by creating an account on GitHub.

HAProxy releases are one of the few instances where I still feel excitement instead of dread
https://www.haproxy.com/blog/announcing-haproxy-3-4

Announcing HAProxy 3.4
HAProxy 3.4 brings important improvements to flexibility, performance, security, reliability, and more. Explore further by diving into our announcement.

"The main driver is a rapid change in how software is being built. Since the second half of December 2025, agentic development workflows have accelerated sharply."
😂
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availabili…

An update on GitHub availability
Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

Let's Encrypt is announcing that they'll support Merkle Tree Certificates:
#TLS

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe MTCs are worth pursuing as a key to a post-quantum future. An increasingly urgent problem For much of the last several years, the conversation about post-quantum cryptograp…

What if you set out to shoot yourself in the foot, and instead you shot off the whole rest of your body? https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/
That’s GitHub, and the whole rest of the tech industry, right …

An update on GitHub availability
Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

Memory V re-creates the Memorymoog without the massive headaches or price tag https://www.theverge.com/entertainment/937054/arturia-memory-v-memorymoog-synthesizer

Maximizing Connectivity of Uplink RIS-Assisted UAV Networks
Mohammed Saif, Shahrokh Valaee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11523 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.11523 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.11523
arXiv:2606.11523v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In this paper, we present a new approach for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) positioning and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) partitioning to enhance connectivity of uplink RIS-assisted UAV networks. To achieve this, our approach optimizes RIS-aided link selection, RIS partitioning, and UAV positions to maximize network connectivity characterized by its Fiedler value. Meanwhile, it maintains a specific signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) constraint for user equipment (UE), which is influenced by RIS partitioning and UAV reliability. The network connectivity optimization problem is formulated using the Fiedler value subject to RIS elements allocation and SINR constraints. This problem is a computationally expensive combinatorial optimization, necessitating an efficient iterative approach. In particular, we propose a perturbation method for RIS-aided link selection, and derive a closed-form solution for RIS partitioning, with each partition tailored to optimize SINR for individual UAV. For the given RIS-aided links and RIS partitioning, we then show that the problem of UAV positioning can be formulated as a low complexity semi-definite programming (SDP) optimization problem, which can be solved using off-the-shelf CVX solvers. Our simulations show the potential gain of UAV positioning and RIS partitioning compared to the benchmark schemes from the literature.
toXiv_bot_toot

The U.S. just added a record 9.7 GWh of grid battery storage in Q1.
Illinois is deploying virtual power plants and 3 GW of storage to cut bills and boost reliability.
Africa's electric motorcycle sales are hitting six figures, slashing fuel costs and urban pollution.
Real progress, happening now.
Sign up for the For People And Planet climate solutions digest:

Weekly Climate Solutions Digest
Welcome Late May leans into long light. Peonies unfold like soft lanterns, bees fumble at their seams, and the evening swallows stitch quick cursive across a warm sky. Far south, the Río de la Plata carries a cool, amber sheen as autumn settles. In West African estuaries, young mangrove leaves

from my link log —
A post-quantum future for Let's Encrypt.
https://letsencrypt.org/2026/06/03/pq-certs.html
saved 2026-06-03 https://

A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt
Let’s Encrypt is committed to a post-quantum-safe Web PKI. The path we’re planning to take is Merkle Tree Certificates (“MTCs”), a new approach that adds post-quantum authentication to the web without sacrificing the speed and reliability that have made TLS universal. This post is about these plans and why we believe MTCs are worth pursuing as a key to a post-quantum future. An increasingly urgent problem For much of the last several years, the conversation about post-quantum cryptograp…

GitHub addresses two recent incidents and says it aims to improve reliability amid AI growth, focusing on "availability first, then capacity, then new features" (Vlad Fedorov/The GitHub Blog)
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-…

An update on GitHub availability
Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

Reducing Linguistic Hallucination in LM-Based Speech Enhancement via Noise-Invariant Acoustic-Semantic Distillation
Zheng Wang, Xiaobin Rong, Hang Su, Tianyi Tan, Junnan Wu, Lichun Fan, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Jing Lu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08608 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.08608 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.08608
arXiv:2605.08608v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language model (LM)-based speech enhancement (SE) can generate natural-sounding speech, but under severe noise it often suffers from unreliable conditioning, leading to perceptually plausible yet linguistically incorrect outputs. To address this issue, we propose L3-SE, a noise-invariant acoustic-semantic distillation framework for reducing linguistic hallucination in LM-based SE. The proposed method learns a noise-invariant conditioning encoder from noisy speech by jointly distilling two complementary clean-speech targets: an acoustic target for reconstruction fidelity and a semantic target for linguistic consistency. The resulting noise-invariant acoustic-semantic representations are used to condition a decoder-only autoregressive language model, which predicts clean acoustic tokens that are decoded into enhanced speech. To support high-quality generation, we further employ a high-fidelity codec built on learnable weighted WavLM layer representations as the discrete acoustic interface. By improving the reliability of conditioning under adverse conditions, the proposed framework substantially reduces hallucination and improves content faithfulness. Experiments show that the proposed method consistently outperforms prior LM-based speech enhancement baselines on linguistic consistency metrics, with especially clear gains under low-SNR and reverberant conditions, while maintaining competitive perceptual quality. Audio samples are available at https://max1wz.github.io/L3-SE-Demo-Page/. The complete source code will be released after the manuscript is accepted.
toXiv_bot_toot

A live blog of WWDC 2026, where Apple is expected to announce an overhauled Siri, a Siri app, new AI capabilities, OS updates focused on reliability, and more (Engadget)
https://www.engadget.com/2189169/apple-wwdc-2026-live-blog-siri-ai-ios-27/

WWDC 2026: Live updates from Apple Park on Siri, iOS 27, Apple Intelligence and more - Engadget
Come join us as we report live from the company's "All systems glow" event.

We did a few small things to polish #LinuxBoot channel if you're interested! 🥳

Home
LinuxBoot is the concept of using a Linux kernel and initramfs as a bootloader. The linuxboot repository contains a build system implementing LinuxBoot primarily targeting servers and PCs, which started as NERF in January 2017 at Google. Why? Improves boot reliability by replacing lightly-tested firmware drivers with hardened Linux drivers. Improves boot time by removing unnecessary code. Typically makes boot 20 times faster. Allows customization of the initrd runtime to support site-specific…

What to expect at WWDC 2026: an overhauled Siri, a Siri app, a slew of new AI capabilities, OS updates focused on reliability and responsiveness, and more (Mark Gurman/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

A group of 16 mathematicians publishes the Leiden Declaration on AI and Mathematics to address threats to the field, citing accuracy and reliability concerns (Siobhan Roberts/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/0…

As A.I. Makes Strides in Mathematics, Mathematicians Urge Caution
A week after OpenAI made headlines with an A.I.-generated proof, a new “declaration” by 16 experts raises concerns that the technology threatens math as a discipline.

"The grid is in better shape this summer. Thank solar and batteries."
#Batteries #Energy #Renewables #SolarPower

The grid is in better shape this summer. Thank solar and batteries.
Nationwide grid reliability has improved since last summer — and new solar and batteries, not aging coal plants, are the main reason.

Scaled Cognition, a reliability-focused lab that develops the Agentic Pretrained Transformer model, raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla at a $750M valuation (Steven Rosenbush/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sca…

Wenn die Studis nicht-verstandene #KI-Lösungen abgeben, dann gibt's null Punkte und eine Ansprache, aber wenn die Referees in ihrem Gutachten schreiben "... strengthens the mathematical reliability..." und "is both ... and ..." and jedes Substantiv hat genau zwei Adjektive in dieser "valuable and timely contribution".
Was dann??
#academicchatter

Manila-based Salmon, a consumer finance app targeting underbanked Filipinos, raised $60M in equity and $40M in debt; it raised $310M to date, $160M in equity (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/23/salm

Salmon raises $100M in equity and debt to bring digital credit to underbanked Filipinos | TechCrunch
Salmon is targeting underbanked Filipinos, with little to no credit history, as well as people unhappy with the incumbent lenders' reliability issues.

Microsoft pauses new GitHub Copilot signups for Pro, Pro , and Student tiers, tightens usage limits, removes Opus models from Pro, and limits Opus 4.7 to Pro (The GitHub Blog)
https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-20-changes-to-github-copilot-plans-…

Changes to GitHub Copilot plans for individuals - GitHub Changelog
As shared in our recent blog post, we’re making the following changes to Copilot plans for individuals as part of our ongoing efforts to ensure service reliability and a sustainable…