Tootfinder

This week GitHub starts training on your code by default. For me, code reuse is probably the most ethical AI use case. But turn off training if you're worried about others using your code unethically:
Settings > Copilot > Features > Privacy

Standard Intelligence, which is developing computer use AI models, raised $75M led by Sequoia and Spark at a $500M post-money valuation (Rocket Drew/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/standard-intelligence-rides-neola…

Standard Intelligence Rides Neolab Fervor with Computer Use Model
Pedestrians in downtown San Francisco are used to seeing Waymos navigating the streets. But two months ago, people in the South Park neighborhood saw something new: a Toyota Rav4 driving around with a laptop propped on the dashboard.The laptop was running a new breed of AI model, known as a “ ...

Just started In the Woods, by Tana French, recommended by a friend in a #mystery reading group. First in a series. A detective in a Dublin murder squad gets a new case: a young girl’s been murdered. It happened where 2 friends of his had disappeared & never found 20 years before when he was a kid. Never solved, that case appears to him in flashbacks as he works on the new one. Are they connecte…

We’re still just starting to fully understand NIH funding losses from 2025,
still worrying about whether 2026 funds will be disbursed,
and are already bracing for further attempts to cut the next budget.
One thing is very clear:
the cuts, clawback, and chaos are disproportionately impacting researchers who aren’t white men.
Now, a new analysis of grant terminationsin the first half of 2025 highlights the toll on women,
especially early career resea…

Year 2, Week 13
Mar 21-27, 2026 - work the problem

London-based Perceptic, which says its end-to-end AI platform for drug development is being used by top pharmaceuticals, raised a $12M seed led by Accel (Jeremy Kahn/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/05/2…

Exclusive: Perceptic, a startup automating drug discovery end-to-end for Big Pharma, emerges from stealth with $12 million in seed funding
Accel is leading the seed funding round for Perceptic, which emerges from stealth today.

Raiders NFL Draft Review: Starters, Sleepers, and Long-Term Bets https://www.si.com/nfl/raiders/onsi/las-vegas-down-draft-starters-sleepers-long-term

A starter pack of questions to help think about "discovery" and "knowledge":
1. When was X discovered?
2. Once it was discovered, who knew X?
3. 1000 years later, who knew/knows/will know X?
4. Is X true?
5. Which groups of people would say it's true vs. false?
When X is "a² b² = c² in a right triangle" we think there are nice clean answers to these questions. But when X is "COVID-19 transmits via small airborne aerosols and a mask is needed to reduce the risk of infection" things get more interesting, particularly the answer to question 1. Does something count as "discovered" if many/most people would say it's false?
People love to answer this question by appeal to "scientific consensus" but the scientific consensus on aerosol transmission is still shaky if you consider certain big institutions, and even if it's mostly settled now, there was definitely a period between "experts on transmission know it" and "there's a scientific consensus." So which counts as discovery? What if knowledge is held secret, like many military technologies? What about historical facts that become censored?

Happy CI!
I pulled the trigger and cut over completely, we are no longer building with GitHub Actions at all.
Clean build with 45-74 warnings depending on platform, no asan/ubsan reports on the (admittedly limited) test suite, no static analysis errors, and 210 static analysis warnings - which while not ideal, is much better than the several thousand we had at the start.
This means there is now a window in which pull requests don't have CI checks (since we only run the …

Syria saw an opportunity when the war with Iran cut off access to one of the world’s most important shipping routes.
With multiple Mediterranean ports and borders with Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, the country offers a desperately needed alternative to the blocked Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway that, before the war, was used to transport a hefty share of the global oil supply.
Iraq and Gulf states including the United Arab Emirates have already begun to transport oil an…

Blocked Strait of Hormuz Leads to New Opportunities for Syria
The latest war in the Middle East has created new economic opportunities for Syria thanks to its geography.

Paris-based Lithosquare, which uses AI to speed the discovery of critical mineral and metal deposits, raised a $25M seed led by World Fund and Kindred Capital (Rahul Raj/EU-Startups)
https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/05/pa…

Paris-based Lithosquare raises €22 million to accelerate transition-critical mineral discovery with Geology AI | EU-Startups
Lithosquare, a Paris-based startup that deploys Geology AI and geologist-led intelligence to amplify and accelerate the discovery of transition-critical