2026-07-11 08:09:51
What you lose when you stop reading physical books - Big Think https://bigthink.com/books/reading-physical-books/
What you lose when you stop reading physical books - Big Think https://bigthink.com/books/reading-physical-books/
Jeff Bezos' Prometheus, which is building AI models for physical tasks, raised a $12B Series B at a $41B valuation, following a $6.2B Series A (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/11/prometheus-bezos-industrial-ai
A ravenous black hole in our backyard could be our window into the ancient universe | Space
A ravenous black hole in our backyard could be our window into the ancient universe | Space https://www.space.com/astronomy/black-hole
I'm looking for quantifiable measures of effective information bandwidth from auditory to visual areas in the human brain. Has anyone tried that using what is now known about the human connectome? Next question will be how sensory experience may affect this bandwidth through functional re-routing (non-physical "rewiring").
#blindness
Bucs lose an OTA practice for being too physical https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/49032098/bucs-docked-ota-too-many-guys-ground-says-bowles
I really don't need a new project, but I would love a clustered and/or GPU accelerated image editor for massive images.
Something that can comfortably and performantly rotate, crop, layer stack, align, etc. images at gigapixel scale without bogging down for minutes at a time even on my big iron.
Across my lab I can harness something like 160 physical / 320 logical CPU cores, 1.3 TB of RAM, 50 GB of VRAM, and more shader cores than I feel like counting.
Everything is or…
New blog post on the importance of owning physical (and digital) media, when possible: https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com/2026/06/28/the-importance-of-owning-physical-and-digital-media-when-possible
Sleep is physical maintenance, but solitude is emotional and cognitive “defragmentation” for me.
#blogging
Intel taps Alex Katouzian, an ex-Qualcomm EVP, to lead Client Computing & Physical AI group, and names Pushkar Ranade as CTO, after serving on an interim basis (Dylan Martin/CRN)
https://www.crn.com/news/components-periph
Saw a hard-hitting ad about the consequences of driving while on drugs, which was immediately undermined by the shock physical trauma of a Tango soft drink ad.
Vision-Language-Action Models Meet World Models: Embodied Agentic AI for Low-Altitude Wireless Networks
Feibo Jiang, Li Dong, Lei Mao, Kezhi Wang, Cunhua Pan, Dong In Kim, Naofal Al-Dhahir
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11618 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.11618 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.11618
arXiv:2606.11618v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Low-Altitude Wireless Networks (LAWNs), composed of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and other aerial platforms, provide integrated perception, communication, and computation services in low-altitude airspace. However, deploying large generative models in this domain faces three major challenges: 1) Limited embodied action mapping; 2) Inadequate physical environment modeling; 3) Insufficient closed-loop optimization. To address these challenges, this study proposes an Embodied Agentic UAV framework. Centered on a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model as the execution core, the framework establishes an end-to-end embodied decision-making pipeline from multimodal environmental perception to continuous control generation. In addition, a World Model (WM) is introduced to capture the coupling between UAV actions and environmental state evolution, thereby supporting environment prediction, policy verification, and dynamic optimization. Furthermore, memory and reflection mechanisms are incorporated to form an adaptive closed-loop optimization paradigm of decision, execution, evaluation, and update, thereby enhancing the system's autonomous decision-making capability and continual evolution ability in complex dynamic environments. Experimental results validate its effectiveness in enabling robust, predictive, and sustainable autonomous control in LAWNs.
toXiv_bot_toot
"Spotify's effective payout averages roughly $0.003 to $0.005 per stream... By contrast, Bandcamp pays artists roughly 82% of each sale. A direct $10 album sale can exceed revenue from thousands of streams. Buying music or books directly from artists, whether physical or DRM-free digital, is one of the most direct ways to support them."
Artists are likely better off when you #buy o…
No, I can't see any possible way this could be a bad thing.
https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-forcing-telecoms-to-get-all-customers-ids/
Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons
Siang-Yun Liu, Bo-Ren Huang, Zhi-Xuan Zen, Yen-Hung Chen, Pin-Ju Tsai
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.12216 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.12216 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.12216
arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.
toXiv_bot_toot
UK astronaut #JohnMcFall could become the first person with a physical disability to live in orbit, thanks to an agreement signed between the UK government and US commercial space company #Vast: #Haven1 (not launched yet!) as early as next year.
So THAT’S what they look like. Oddly, I’ve read about books receiving Nebulas and Hugos and PKD Awards, but it never occurred to me that they were physical artefacts AND accolades. Huh. 🤔
Re: https://wandering.shop/@effies/116717392735380026
RE: https://front-end.social/@rem/116534370356477290
“A conference is a physical network of incredible people”—@… ❤️
Why do we let the greedy capitalists do this to our industry?
#LLM
CBS legend spills on 'jaw-dropping' meeting before firing: 'Accuses me of physical abuse' - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/cbs-news-2677008874/
Google plans to open its first physical Google Store outside of the US, in Tokyo's Omotesando district "this summer", marking Google's 11th physical store (Damien Wilde/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2026/06/01/goog
Cowboys Have 53-Man Roster Upset Brewing With Physical Freak UDFA Michael Trigg https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/dallas-cowboys-have-53-man-roster-upset-brewing-physical-freak-udfa-michael-trigg
Most Americans say Trump is mentally, physically unfit to serve effectively: Poll (Ashleigh Fields/The Hill)
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5862406-trump-mental-fitness-physical-health-poll/
http://www.memeorandum.com/260504/p72#a260504p72
Every now and then I have one of those days where I discover all of these marvellous people on the Fedi and they're nearby (in some sense, whether physical or by interests) and they've been here for a couple of years and I don't know them. It's delightful! It's way more delightful than when there were only a few thousand people!
I do feel sad when I look at all the amazing folks who were here but left. I hope they all come back.
Behind the public’s mounting worries is a growing sense that Trump isn’t mentally all there.
Physical and mental health aren’t easily separated, especially as one reaches 80. I often can’t remember where I put my wallet and keys or why I’ve entered a room. I also have less patience than I used to have. (I’m less tolerant of long lines, automated phone menus and Republicans.)
But if Trump can’t remember where he put, say, a top-secret memo or why he entered the Situation Room, or …
FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs https://www.404media.co/fcc-wants-to-kill-burner-phones-by-forcing-telecoms-to-get-all-customers-ids/
Survey: 59% of Gen Z users in the US, UK, and AU actively add and drop streaming services to view a single movie or series, 71% stopped buying physical music (Jennifer Maas/Variety)
https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/gen-z-cancels-streaming-sub…
Finally got my paws on a physical CD of Switched-On-Bach by Wendy Carlos, which she apparently REALLY doesn’t want copied. I guess that explains why there is no digital version.
The disk format is a rococo tangle. iTunes can play the music, but it cannot import from the disk. It cannot understand whatever arcane trick was used to construct it. I had to copy the AIFF files manually and import the copies, then add metadata manually.
Sharing big R objects across processes shouldn’t mean copying them over and over.
mori uses shared memory ALTREP to give you zero-copy access—multiple processes, one underlying object.
Fast, memory-efficient, and built for modern parallel workflows.
👉 https://shikokuchuo.net/mori/
RE: https://meta.masto.host/@GamingNews/116529674646601494
The whole idea of mogging being based on physical appearance just seems wrong to me.
Now that the trump name is being removed from the Kennedy Center I wonder whether trump will try to sell off the physical letters that were removed and keep the proceeds to himself?
genetic_multiplex: Multiplex genetic interactions (2014)
Multiplex networks representing different types of genetic interactions, for different organisms. Layers represent (i) physical, (ii) association, (iii) co-localization, (iv) direct, and (v) suppressive, (vi) additive or synthetic genetic interaction. Edge direction (i,j) indicates gene i interacting with gene j.
This network has 1203 nodes and 2522 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unwei…
The case to buy physical media: Sony is removing all purchased Studio Canal movies from users libraries - no refunds - including:
▫️ Terminator 2: Judgment Day
▫️ Apocalypse Now: Final Cut
▫️ Hot Fuzz
▫️ Total Recall
▫️ Rambo: First Blood
▫️ Paddington
▫️ Moonlight
▫️ Bridget Jones’s Diary
☑️ Sony Removes Hundreds of Purchased PlayStation Store Movies From Customer Libraries
Trump regime takes aim at crucial ocean monitoring network. Ships will be dispatched this month to remove the more than 900 deep-sea instruments that comprise the network, one of the world’s most trusted sources of climate and oceanic data. https://www.scientificame…
Causal Scaffolding for Physical Reasoning: A Benchmark for Causally-Informed Physical World Understanding in VLMs
Tianyi Tang, Zhuoyi Lin, Zeyu Feng, Tianyi Ma, Yew-Soon Ong, Ivor Tsang, Haiyan Yin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05966
I am challenging the status quo today (Jun-26) and submitted a physical (yes, offline) product at ProductHunt. Feel free to support me there!
#privacy
https://www.producthunt.com/products/paint
Reading Douglas Adams when I was 12 meant my tiny little mind got to learn all sorts of words and terms that were exciting but not too complex.
I had to rely on context clues and a physical dictionary. Or just, you know, keep reading.
My own writing is even more obtuse.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog…
I would accept Sony PS to stop making physical disc if they didn't claimed this decision was based on players preferences.
White House Releases Results of Trump's Latest Physical Exam (Chris Cameron/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/30/us/politics/trump-health-medical-physical-exam.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260530/p43#a260530p43
It's a shame that PlayStation is abandoning physical discs - and essentially physical retail - for games. But any advantages of physical media for games evaporated a decade ago. Developers released literally unplayable games in the expectation of a Day One Patch.
Source: OBJ works out for Giants, takes physical https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48542988/source-odell-beckham-jr-works-giants-takes-physical
Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.PF. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.PF/new
[1/1]:
- FP8 is All You Need (Part 1): Debunking Hardware FP64 as the HPC Holy Grail
Satoshi Matsuoka
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06510 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAR_bot/116713312554823102
- P-Cast Precision in FP8 Attention: Sink-Induced Collapse and the Optimality of S=2^8
Reed Lau
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06521 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAR_bot/116713315110983325
- Quantized AI Inference on Constrained Embedded Platforms for Small-Satellite Settings
Carlos Rafael Tordoya Taquichiri, Hans Dermot Doran, Pablo Ghiglino
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06528 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAR_bot/116713322189822290
- AEGIS: A Backup Reflex for Physical AI
Josef Chen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06660 https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csAI_bot/116713377832304925
toXiv_bot_toot
Chargers mock Ravens failing Maxx Crosby physical in schedule release video https://raiderswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/raiders/2026/05/14/chargers-mock-ravens-failing-maxx-crosby-physi…
Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match tool to support 30 additional languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/spotify-l…
Är promenader mer effektivt än konditionsträning för fettförbränning?
https://traningslara.se/ar-promenader-mer-effektivt-an-konditionstraning-for-fettforbranning/
Rockstar says physical copies of GTA 6 will contain a digital download code, not a disc; physical copies release on November 12, ahead of the November 19 launch (Tom Phillips/IGN)
https://www.ign.com/articles/grand-theft-auto-6…
Outlandish experiment shows top officials risking physical injury to please Trump - Raw Story
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-cabinet-2677002630/
From collider experiments to large-scale astronomy systems, this session by Dmitriy Kostunin and Julian von Hoerschelmann-Schliwinski takes an honest look at where AI delivers measurable gains, and where it falls short.
Learn more about this session: https://2026.berlinbuzzwords.de/session/ai-in-the-physical-world-from-observation-to-discovery/
There are just 59 Robotaxis on the road, Bloomberg reports,
with at least some of them still requiring physical human supervision.
Its efforts to expand past its home base in Austin, Texas are floundering,
with the company forced to admit to California state regulators that its self-driving cabs don’t actually drive themselves, according to the reporting.
This incremental progress would be permissible at a smaller company.
But Musk has persistently wooed investo…
Dallas Cowboys To Try More Physical Practice Approach For 2026 Training Camp https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/dallas-cowboys-to-try-more-physical-practice-approach-for-2026-training-camp
Mistral launches Robostral Navigate, a hardware-agnostic robotics navigation model trained via simulation that utilizes a single camera and language prompts (Benoit Berthelot/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
Remember when Xbox tried to move away from physical media to reduce distribution costs during the 2013 Xbox One launch?
And Sony pissed all over Microsoft for it? 🤔
✅ Xbox One loses some disc-free play, family game-sharing plan with revised policies
https://www.
Trump Undergoes a Physical Exam at Walter Reed (Karoun Demirjian/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/us/politics/trump-physical-walter-reed.html
http://www.memeorandum.com/260526/p63#a260526p63
Odell Beckham Jr. has physical, workout with New York Giants: Sources https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7212845/2026/04/20/odell-beckham-jr-giants-physical/
Prometheus,
the physical AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the former co-founder of Verily, Google’s life sciences unit,
announced it raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation.
The new funds came from Bezos,
as well as from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.
This is the second fundraise round for Prometheus, which launched late last year with an initial raise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC.
Prometheus is bu…
tree-of-life: Protein interactomes across the tree of life (2019)
Protein-protein iteraction networks ("interactome") for 1,840 species. An interactome captures all physical protein-protein interactions within one species, from direct biophysical protein-protein interactions to regulatory protein-DNA and metabolic interactions. .
This network has 307 nodes and 726 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions
“National data shows that almost half of Australians already fall short of minimum physical activity guidelines, and rising prices are making even basic care unaffordable for many.”
I’m not saying this stupid war on #Iran is wholly responsible for #inflation, but it’s certainly not helping—and even its dis…
Podcast: The Physical Politics of the Internet with Britt Paris https://www.404media.co/podcast-the-physical-politics-of-the-internet-with-britt-paris/
Nvidia says South Korea's Naver will use its technology to build AI factories at "gigawatt scale" to meet rising global demand for AI services and physical AI (Heekyong Yang/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific…
I keep seeing things about how they're adding Tales from the Crypt to Shudder starting tomorrow, but Shudder is $7.99 a month and up. I looked on eBay and the whole series on DVD is on there for less than $30 shipped, in the USA at least. And you'd own all of it forever. The math doesn't math. Physical media ftw
I know next to nothing of substance abt The Amazing Digital Circus. All I know is that every time a trans woman makes a virtual reality story she makes a zillion bucks and her characters get turned into fortnite skins cuz of our innate sauce with the feeling of physical disconnection, and im lowk tempted to try continuing the family nacho recipe even as itd be purely cynical cuz I actually really really only care abt the process of becoming a real physical person im tired of thinking within …
James Pearce Jr. returns to Falcons for minicamp physical amid intervention program https://www.nfl.com/news/james-pearce-jr-falcons-physical-mandatory-minicamp-intervention-program
Physical shops would much rather people shop online.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/03/guilty-until-proven-innocent-shoppers-falsely-identified-by-facial-recognitio…
Chipmaker Onsemi agrees to buy Synaptics in a nearly $7B all-stock deal expected to close in the middle of 2027; ON drops 9% and SYNA jumps 11% after hours (Samantha Subin/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/25/on-semi-synaptics-deal-physical-ai.html
…
With the detection of the Higgs boson,
the standard model is an almost complete theory.
Missing from the model is a massless spin-two boson, the graviton.
We might reasonably expect that detection of gravitational radiation would include the observation of the graviton as the quanta of the radiation.
However, the connection between gravitational radiation observations and the theoretical graviton has yet to be realized due to the physical limitations on single-gravit…
Q&A with Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson on why the startup is going public via SPAC, the physical layer as its proprietary advantage, safety, and more (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/this
The Harbaugh effect: Why Giants leaned bigger, str... https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/48630512/new-york-giants-coach-john-harbaugh-joe-schoen-2026-nfl-draft-reese-mauigoa
Sony says all new PlayStation games from both first- and third-party developers will be sold in digital formats from January 2028, ending physical game discs (Stephen Totilo/Game File)
https://www.gamefile.news/p/sony-drops-playstation-discs-2028-ps3-vit…
Spotify launches a feature to buy physical books in the US and UK, powered by Bookshop.org, and expands its Page Match tool to support 30 additional languages (Lauren Forristal/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/spotify-l…
Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3, an open physical AI foundation model, to help robots and autonomous cars better understand the real world with limited training data (Ina Fried/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-ai-push-cosmos-3-world-model
History repeats itself more than it should.
If you think we cannot get out from under these ghouls, then all I can say is we did it several times before.
We should be getting good at it by now.
The closest Trump's gonna get to heaven is on an airplane.
Go figure, cause I can't
Keep protests peaceful.
Don't kill anyone.
They DO make a difference.
Here are some resistance related guides from around the world:
🇺🇸 Fundamentals …
Human Archive, which trains robots using first-person video from 1,000 camera-equipped caps worn by Indian home services workers, raised $8.2M from YC and more (Ivan Mehta/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/human…
LG shares jumped 300% this year, after largely sitting out South Korea's chip-rally in 2025, as LG seeks to expand into physical AI businesses such as robots (Sangmi Cha/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
Physical Intelligence says its new model, π0.7, can direct robots on tasks they weren't trained on, an "early sign" of generalization, surprising researchers (Connie Loizos/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/202…
The Pentagon is moving to recruit hundreds of troops to appear as spectators at President Trump’s UFC cage-fighting event on the White House lawn,
and requiring those who attend to pay their own way and meet height and weight requirements.
https://www.
Robotics startup Generalist, which released its GEN-1 model to complete short physical tasks in April, raised $400M led by Radical Ventures at a $2B valuation (Dina Bass/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/202…
Analysis: Asian suppliers account for ~90% of Nvidia's production costs, up from 65% in 2025, as latest wave of collaborations shifts from chips to physical AI (Abhishek Vishnoi/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20
Alibaba's AI unit Tongyi Lab launches the Qwen Robot Suite, its first family of AI models for robots, in pilot testing with some enterprise clients (Wency Chen/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article
Apoha, which is developing a "Liquid State Intelligence" data layer to measure molecules in the real world, emerges from stealth with $36M led by Singular (Mike Butcher/Pathfounders)
https://pathfounders.com/p/apoha-emerges-from-stealth-with-36m-to-teach-…
San Diego-based Aether AI, which is building "causal world models" to teach robots cause and effect instead of pattern-matching, raised a $20M seed led by MPCi (Cristian Dina/The Next Web)
https://thenextweb.com/news/aether-ai-causal-world-models-20m-…
Avoca, whose AI agents let physical services businesses handle inbound calls and dispatch, raised $125M across seed, Series A, and Series B at a $1B valuation (Allie Garfinkle/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/04/27/avoca-a
CarbonSix, which is developing AI automation and robotic intelligence tech for manufacturing, raised a $40M Series A co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment (FinSMEs)
https://www.finsmes.com/2026/07/carbonsix-raises-40m-in-series-a-funding.html
PitchBook: VC investment in global robotics and physical AI jumped to $26B in 2025 from $4.2B in 2019, and has already topped $23B as of May 20 this year (Kate Clark/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/…
Japan commits up to $6.16B over five years to Noetra, a consortium led by SoftBank, Honda, NEC, and Sony, to develop a domestic AI foundation model by 2027 (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/techn
China will implement new online food delivery regulations on June 1, requiring platforms to regularly verify businesses' identities, locations, and licenses (Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/china-to-crack-down-on-fo…
A look at Eka, which trains its robotic claw on a "vision-force-action model" incorporating realistic joints, motors, and physics principles into its simulation (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/when-robots-have-their-chatgpt-…