Alcatraz, which develops AI-powered facial-recognition security systems for building access, raised a $50M Series B, bringing its total funding to $100M (Mike Wheatley/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/04/02/alcatraz-r…
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.
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
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching
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 …
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…
New thread since the other was getting long and disorganized... Continuing bringup and deployment of the new 40/100G core switch. So far I'm about half done by number of existing physical ports, not counting currently dark fiber I plan to light up.
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.
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.
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.
“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…
Got an Amber Alert today, and my weather app, @…, did a better job than the state of Tennessee. In fact, TN failed, as they do at most things lately.
The alert from TN had a Bitly link (already looks suspicious) that goes to a Facebook page that requires you to login. :picard:
Sources: Microsoft has been working on a disc-to-digital feature for Xbox One and Xbox Series X that will let users digitize their physical game collections (Tom Warren/The Verge)
"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…
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 320 nodes and 387 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions
Had an #acting #coaching client get some material into their physical self more (as opposed to their mind) and we did a couple takes that had new ways for the crux of the scene to play. So cool to see that whole other way of engaging.
En la mani del #1deMayo un compañero me ha hablado de este artículo sobre la salud del uso de la #ia en el entorno laboral. No lo he leído aún pero me ha dicho que es muy interesante lo que plantea
Console gamers really are being robbed in bright daylight, smh.
I had hoped that y'all could enjoy physical copies for a few years longer 🫂
Replaced article(s) found for cs.DB. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DB/new
[1/1]:
- Test-Time Optimization of Physical Query Plans with LLMs
Mehmet Hamza Erol, Xiangpeng Hao, Federico Bianchi, Ciro Greco, Jacopo Tagliabue, James Zou
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
Simulating Infant First-Person Sensorimotor Experience via Motion Retargeting from Babies to Humanoids
Francisco M. L\'opez, Hoshinori Kanazawa, Ondrej Fiala, Yakov Balashov, Valentin Marcel, Lukas Rustler, Miles Lenz, Dongmin Kim, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Jochen Triesch, Matej Hoffmann
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27583 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27583 https://arxiv.org/html/2604.27583
arXiv:2604.27583v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Motion retargeting from humans to human-like artificial agents is becoming increasingly important as humanoid robots grow more capable. However, most existing approaches focus only on reproducing kinematics and ignore the rich sensorimotor experience associated with human movement. In this work, we present a framework for simulating the multimodal sensorimotor experiences of infants using physical and virtual humanoids. From a single video, our method reconstructs the infant's body configuration by extracting its skeletal structure and estimating the full 3D pose from each frame. Then we map the reconstructed motion onto several developmental platforms: the physical iCub robot and the virtual simulators pyCub, EMFANT and MIMo. Replaying the retargeted motions on these embodiments produces simulated multisensory streams including proprioception (joints and muscles), touch, and vision. For the best-matching embodiment, the retargeting achieves sub-centimeter accuracy and enables a rich multimodal analysis of infant development as well as enhanced automated annotation of behaviors. This framework provides a unique window into the infant's sensorimotor experience, offering new tools for robotics, developmental science, and early detection of neurodevelopmental disorders. The code is available at https://github.com/ctu-vras/motion-retargeting/.
toXiv_bot_toot
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 217 nodes and 230 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions
Edge-Based QoS-Aware Adaptive Task Placement: A Closed-Loop Control in Multi-Robot Systems
Thien Tran, Jonathan Kua, Thuong Hoang, Minh Tran, Honghao Lyu, Jiong Jin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00552 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.00552 https://arxiv.org/html/2606.00552
arXiv:2606.00552v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multi-robot systems (MRS) increasingly offload compute-intensive perception tasks to edge nodes to meet strict time-sensitive Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. However, static task orchestration on a shared edge node can severely degrade QoS due to network latency, jitter, and edge-resource contention. We present a pilot edge-centric MRS testbed using Raspberry Pi nodes to evaluate a camera-to-manipulator pipeline under three modes: local execution, static offloading, and a QoS-aware Adaptive Task Placement (ATP) controller. ATP scores candidate placements using a multi-metric cost (normalized latency, CPU utilization, and switching overhead) over two-second control windows. The closed-loop visual servoing testbed is instrumented with sub-millisecond clock synchronization, network emulation, and detailed monitoring of multiple metrics across nodes to capture realistic jitter. Experimental results under compute-stress and network-fault scenarios show that static edge offloading reduces on-board CPU load but amplifies tail latency and deadline misses. In contrast, the QoS-aware ATP controller, by switching task placement based on measured latency and utilization thresholds, consistently lowers deadline violations and tail latency. Overall, the results position ATP as a practical edge-side control primitive for MRS and concrete design guidelines for Cloud-Edge Robotics deployments within the broader cloud-fog automation, while motivating QoS-aware multi-objective workload orchestration for industrial cyber-physical systems.
toXiv_bot_toot
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
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
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 800 nodes and 6429 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwei…
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
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/
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 …
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
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching
Mathematical modelling of physical systems means deciding what features to include. I often advise my students that the very simplest models are the best place to start. E.g. start to model a car as a simple mass with forces applied to it, then add complexity later if needed, instead of getting bogged down by the details of every component at the start.
This FT article suggests a similar thing in an entertaining way.
£
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-…
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 …
So what are your thoughts on these weighty book matters?
Yes
Long
"Real"/Physical
New
No, but it's not for lack of trying
#ThisOrThat
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/sHe_hqwpWaQ
I never cease to be mystified by this common work-from-home complaint.
I’ve been 100% wfh aside from a half-dozen short trips to NJ for “all-hands” meetings since 2008. Last one of those was 2016.
I consider solitude when working one of the great positive features of wfh. Having people forcibly interrupt me by their physical presence gained me a ‘prickly’ reputation in my last office.
A while back, I was mostly-lurking on a regional #Meshcore (like #Meshtastic , but different) discord, when someone on there tried to update a repeater and accidentally soft-bricked it. They needed to climb up to where it is to get a physical connection. But there's a raven nesting near where they've …
Things not on my bingo card for this year: winning a prize for physical strength. Turned out, server lifting is a competition @… runs at #GLT, and a cute tux found a loving home.
Is it just me or does #JonyIve share some physical similarities with #TheEdge from U2? 🤔
Doing errands with our #suv (shopping utility vehicle). For the cover we bought the rain cover of an outdoor backpack. Works pretty well.
Meanwhile I also have an adapter mounted on my axel, too. so I can use it as well. 🎉
Best combination of shopping and physical activity. But I feel a little weird as hardly ever see anybody else with a trailer around. But I simply shouldn't care …
Wavefunction collapse is only one interpretation. Under some interpretations, graduate students also have souls.
#Comic
“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢
“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢
“The project does not involve field research, laboratory experiments, or resource-intensive physical processes. The project-related activities are primarily computer-based and organizational in nature, and focus on the analysis and testing of data-driven infrastructures. Ecological sustainability aspects are therefore only marginally relevant.”
Well, the environmental impact of academic IT projects is indeed marginal compared to commercial operations, but…
⇢
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…
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…
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…
Since his first years as a top player, Jannik Sinner has long had one major weakness.
The hotter it is, the more vulnerable he becomes.
It nearly toppled him at January’s Australian Open, before Novak Djokovic did the job instead.
On Thursday, with temperatures climbing toward the 90s at Roland Garros, Sinner could not endure.
In the second round of the French Open, the world No. 1 fell victim to Juan Manuel Cerúndolo of Argentina, the world No. 56.
He grew dizzy…
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
…
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Knoebel/116818598997578427
That's why you buy DRM-free / physical media 🙂↕️
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
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching
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.
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…
I hear a longstandingly mentally ill man,
a narcissistic sociopath who is cognitively declining in his elder years,
becoming increasingly disinhibited.
We don't know exactly what his health is ...
He's obviously physically unwell.
— he's drooping on one side.
Did he have a left hemisphere CVA?
We don't know any of that, because they obviously would lie to us about any of it
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-…
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 536 nodes and 3600 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwei…
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…
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/…
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them."
—Bruce Lee
#acting #coaching
Poetry gives people a language to express collective grief.
In Gaza, poetry documents what cameras cannot always reach and what numbers can never explain.
When destruction erases physical spaces, poetry becomes a witness to history.
https://w…
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 610 nodes and 1988 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions
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
copenhagen: Copenhagen Networks Study
A network of social interactions among university students within the Copenhagen Networks Study, over a period of four weeks, sampled every 5 minutes. Interactions include physical proximity (undirected), phone calls (directed, weighted), text messages (directed), and information about Facebook friendships (undirected). Nodes include some metadata, including gender.
This network has 568 nodes and 24333 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Unwe…
Japan, driven by labor shortages, is increasingly adopting robotics and physical AI, with a hybrid model where startups innovate and corporations provide scale (Kate Park/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/05/japan-is-proving-e…
Arm EVP Mohamed Awad says its chip architecture now accounts for 50% of the hyperscale cloud computing market, as AI demand transforms the data center industry (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
https://asia.nikkei.com/editor-s-picks
Sony AI says its autonomous ping pong robot is the first robot to attain expert-level performance in a physical sport after beating some top-level human players (Will Dunham/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/sports/ping-pong-robo…
Nvidia researchers unveil ENPIRE, an agent harness framework that develops robotic self-improvement strategies for physical tasks with minimal human supervision (Jeremy Hsu/Ars Technica)
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ai-coding-agents-can-auton…