Tootfinder

"First, everything — everything — Trump has done on trade has, in addition to its illegality, been a violation of past U.S. agreements with other countries. So we emerge from the trade war as a nation that can no longer be trusted to honor its promises."
"We could have achieved victory by not hitting ourselves in the face in the first place."

The US CBP signs a two-year deal with AI logistics company Altana, and will use its platform for real-time trade enforcement, forced labor detection, and more (Mackenzie Weinger/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2025/10/31/cbp-altana-ai-trade

Exclusive: CBP taps Altana's AI for trade enforcement
Private firms and federal agencies are looking for ways to navigate supply-chain uncertainty.

Whatever This Is, It Is Not Strategy -- Defending the nation will take more than sycophancy, slurs, and slop. (Eliot A. Cohen/The Atlantic)
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/unserious-national-defense-strategy/685784/?gift=uknf6XP0NWAxCOSANNYObRx9HosyqhA7HBjYHRleMp8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
http://www.memeorandum.com/260129/p47#a260129p47

Sources: ByteDance plans to spend about $14B on Nvidia's AI chips in 2026, an increase of about 18% from 2025 (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3338191/bytedance-pour-u…

Exclusive | ByteDance to pour US$14 billion into Nvidia chips in 2026 as AI demand surges
Chinese unicorn’s computing needs have climbed across its portfolio of popular apps, cloud unit Volcano Engine and large language models.

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Based just on anecdotal evidence: it seems surprisingly common for scientists to be told by funders, managers, or policy people that mentioning #uncertainty or limitations “complicates” the message or weakens its impact [1]. (Days ago, yet another colleague shared a story on this, with other scientists nodding along, recalling similar moments happened to them)
But here's the …

Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds,
has given us the "Hero Developer":
a figure who ships features at midnight,
who “moves fast and breaks things,”
who transforms whiteboard scribbles into billion-dollar unicorns through sheer caffeinated will.
We celebrate this person constantly.
They're on the front page of TechCrunch et al.
They keynote conferences.
Their G…

The Rime of the Ancient Maintainer
Every culture produces heroes that reflect its deepest anxieties. The Greeks, terrified of both mortality and immortality, gave us Achilles. The Victorians, haunted by social mobility, gave us the self-made industrialist. And Silicon Valley, drunk on exponential curves and both terrified and entranced by endless funding rounds, has given us

Precious metals soared Monday
— with gold extending its record run past $5,100 per troy ounce and silver surging to new highs
— as investors continued to load up on hard assets as a hedge against geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty.

Gold was up 2.4 percent on New York’s COMEX commodities exchange before pulling back;
it had crossed the $5,000 threshold for the first time a day earlier.
Silver, which tends to be more volatile, spiked 14.6 percent Mon…

Why gold and silver prices are surging at breakneck speeds
A record-setting rally in precious metals comes as global investors diversify away from the U.S. dollar, a phenomenon known as the “debasement trade.”

Crypto payments network Mesh raised a $75M Series C led by Dragonfly at a $1B valuation, bringing its total funding to $200M (Naga Avan-Nomayo/The Block)
https://www.theblock.co/post/387241/crypto-payments-net…

Sources detail how Tiger Global fueled the COVID-era unicorn bubble that burst ahead of the AI boom; the firm recently shared its $12.7B 2021 fund is now up 16% (Issie Lapowsky/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/tiger-global-unicorn-investment-crash/

Big bets and broken unicorns: Tiger Global’s rise and reckoning
The fast-money pandemic era helped build billion-dollar startups around the world — then brought many down just as quickly. Will the AI boom be a repeat?

StepFun, a Chinese AI startup that develops LLMs and has partnered with automaker Geely and smartphone brands like Oppo and Honor, raised a ~$717M Series B (Eudora Wang/DealStreetAsia)
https://www.dealstreetasia.com/stories/stepfun-series-b-round-470495/

Tencent-backed China LLM unicorn StepFun bags $720m in Series B+ round
StepFund expects to deploy its LLMs into over one million vehicles this year.