Tootfinder

Meta expects 2025 capital expenditures to be between $66B and $72B, raising the low end of the company's previous estimate of $64B to $72B (Jonathan Vanian/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/meta-q2-earnings-report-2025.html

Meta shares climb 10% on revenue beat, raised forecast
Meta will report its second-quarter earnings after the bell.

Amazon raises its forecast for capital expenditures to $125B in 2025, up from its earlier estimate of $118B, and says that number will likely increase in 2026 (Annie Palmer/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/amazon-amzn-q3-earnings-report-2025.html

Amazon stock soars 10% as earnings beat estimates, company posts strong cloud growth
AWS revenue accelerated 20.2% to $33 billion, which CEO Andy Jassy said was a pace it hadn't seen since 2022.

FLORES: A Reconfigured Wheel-Legged Robot for Enhanced Steering and Adaptability
Zhicheng Song, Jinglan Xu, Chunxin Zheng, Yulin Li, Zhihai Bi, Jun Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.22345

FLORES: A Reconfigured Wheel-Legged Robot for Enhanced Steering and Adaptability
Wheel-legged robots integrate the agility of legs for navigating rough terrains while harnessing the efficiency of wheels for smooth surfaces. However, most existing designs do not fully capitalize on the benefits of both legged and wheeled structures, which limits overall system flexibility and efficiency. We present FLORES (reconfigured wheel-legged robot for enhanced steering and adaptability), a novel wheel-legged robot design featuring a distinctive front-leg configuration that sets it bey…

Friend, which launched a $129 AI-powered, always-listening necklace, plasters NYC subway with ads in $1M campaign that includes over 1,000 platform posters (Trishla Ostwal/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/ai-startup-friend-bet…

AI Startup Friend Bets On Foes With $1M NYC Subway Campaign
Some subway riders have defaced the posters with phrases like ‘surveillance capitalism,’ ‘stop profiting off loneliness,’ and ‘AI trash.’

Feeding the AI bubble are circular investments by BigTech
"The financial structure of these deals between OpenAI, Oracle, and Nvidia has drawn scrutiny from industry observers. Earlier this week, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $100 billion as OpenAI deploys Nvidia systems. As Bryn Talkington of Requisite Capital Management told CNBC: "Nvidia invests $100 billion in OpenAI, which then OpenAI turns back and gives it back to Nvidia."
Oracle's arrangement f…

Why does OpenAI need six giant data centers?
OpenAI’s new $400 billion announcement reveals both growing AI demand and circular investments.

A look at Wired's efforts to turn its journalists into recognizable figures across platforms; over the past year it has launched six new talent-led video series (Mark Stenberg/Adweek)
https://www.adweek.com/media/wired-journalists-influencers-subscriptions/

As Wired Turns Its Journalists Into Influencers, Subscriptions Surge
To capitalize on the momentum, the Condé Nast title is launching a sweeping out-of-home campaign to promote its upcoming issue

Estimating Energy Release in Metallized Composite Explosives Using the Taylor Model
Jason Loiseau, Sebastian Rodriguez Rosero, Yaroslava Poroshyna, S. She-Ming Lau-Chapdelaine
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16227

Estimating Energy Release in Metallized Composite Explosives Using the Taylor Model
The potential for reactive metal fuels to enhance the energetic output of high explosives has generated an enduring interest in the study of composite explosives. It has typically been demonstrated that added metal fuels can have little or even deleterious impact on the accelerating ability of composite military explosives relative to baseline performance. Often this has led to the assumption of limited reaction of the metal fuel over microsecond timescales. The widespread availability of Photo…

Seneca, which is developing autonomous firefighting drones, raised $60M in seed and Series A rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Convective Capital (Christopher Marquis/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/…

How Seneca’s Firefighting Drones Signal A New Era Of Climate Adaptation
Seneca’s firefighting drones show how adaptation tech is shaping a resilience economy amid rising climate risks and billion-dollar wildfire disasters.

Bad year for bicycling at the California State Capitol. Caltrans quick-build bill died, among others.
https://www.calbike.org/bike-friendly-bills-bite-the-dust/

Bike-Friendly Bills Bite the Dust - CalBike
After several years of successful campaigns, including passing the Freedom to Walk Act,the Complete Streets Bill, and securing $1 billion for the Active Transportation Program, 2025 is shaping up to be a dismal year for active transportation efforts in Sacramento. A combination of budget shortfalls, literal and metaphorical fires, and a federal government openly hostile […]

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents
Thomas Carta, Cl\'ement Romac, Loris Gaven, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Olivier Sigaud, Sylvain Lamprier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14751

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents
Open-ended AI agents need to be able to learn efficiently goals of increasing complexity, abstraction and heterogeneity over their lifetime. Beyond sampling efficiently their own goals, autotelic agents specifically need to be able to keep the growing complexity of goals under control, limiting the associated growth in sample and computational complexity. To adress this challenge, recent approaches have leveraged hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) and language, capitalizing on its compos…