Tootfinder

Sources: ex-xAI researcher Eric Zelikman is raising $1B at a $5B valuation for Humans&, which aims to train AI that is better at collaborating with humans (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2025…

xAI Researcher In Talks To Raise $1 Billion For New Frontier Lab Humans&
Founded by former xAI staffer Eric Zelikman and early Googler Georges Harik, the new lab is building models that are better at interacting with humans.

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-65468-7 "while EVC is permanently affected by early deprivation, categorical coding in VOTC shows resilience"; <…

Impact of a transient neonatal visual deprivation on the development of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex in humans - Nature Communications
This study shows that transient blindness at birth leaves lasting effects on early visual functions, while higher visual regions encoding categories remain unaffected, revealing different sensitive periods for different functions in vision.

There’s an unwritten rule in publishing,
or so I’ve been told:
don’t write about COVID.
Our collective attention span has been saturated by those endless months holed up in attics and cramped corners of apartments, staring out at a world we could no longer take part in.
When the worst of it passed, we felt an urge to close that chapter, to padlock it behind a heavy latch.
But in doing so, we also tuck away the hard-won lessons of that time:
how quickly s…

Bird flu warnings are being ignored. I’ve seen this pattern before
H5N1 has a 50% fatality rate in humans. Yet we’re dismantling the systems designed to catch it early.

«I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans.»
A case of "it's funny cause it's true", I know some of these
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person

Agent Learning via Early Experience
Kai Zhang, Xiangchao Chen, Bo Liu, Tianci Xue, Zeyi Liao, Zhihan Liu, Xiyao Wang, Yuting Ning, Zhaorun Chen, Xiaohan Fu, Jian Xie, Yuxuan Sun, Boyu Gou, Qi Qi, Zihang Meng, Jianwei Yang, Ning Zhang, Xian Li, Ashish Shah, Dat Huynh, Hengduo Li, Zi Yang, Sara Cao, Lawrence Jang, Shuyan Zhou, Jiacheng Zhu, Huan Sun, Jason Weston, Yu Su, Yifan Wu

Agent Learning via Early Experience
A long-term goal of language agents is to learn and improve through their own experience, ultimately outperforming humans in complex, real-world tasks. However, training agents from experience data with reinforcement learning remains difficult in many environments, which either lack verifiable rewards (e.g., websites) or require inefficient long-horizon rollouts (e.g., multi-turn tool use). As a result, most current agents rely on supervised fine-tuning on expert data, which is challenging to s…

400,000 years ago, early #Neanderthals gathered around a pit in what’s now a #Suffolk forest to spark the oldest known #fire created by human hands.

The moment the earliest known man-made fire was uncovered - BBC News
Archaeologists in the UK have discovered the world's oldest evidence of humans lighting fires