Tootfinder

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

The importance of owning physical (and digital) media when possible
I wrote some about the continued popularity of physical media here in 2024, but I wanted to do one more post on it this year, to also feature some other formats, history, tips and tricks, and outri…

a16z creates a $1.1B Machine Age fund focusing on hardware to "open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI" (Sean O'Kane/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/28/a16z-creates-a-1-1b-machine-…

a16z creates a $1.1B 'Machine Age' fund to 'accelerate the physical buildout of AI' | TechCrunch
The firm, known for its focus on software, is going to start throwing more money at the hardware behind AI.

"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…

Entire Cowboys roster passes physical, ready for camp today https://insidethestar.com/entire-cowboys-roster-passes-physical-ready-for-camp-today

Anthropic releases Model Hardware Standard, a framework to help AI agents use physical systems like microscopes, quantum computing hardware, and robot arms (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-standard-ai-agents-coming-to-the-physic…

This Is How Anthropic Thinks AI Agents Should Navigate the Physical World
The potential for AI to automate scientific research and manufacturing must be balanced with new risks, Anthropic says.

"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 U.S. military shot down three drones with a laser this week on the southern border,
saying the autonomous aircraft were linked to cartels.
The operation, which took place Tuesday to Wednesday, was the first operation where
the military used a high-energy laser
against cartel-linked drones,
according to a statement from the U.S. Northern Command.
The military detected the “hostile” drones as part of activities posing a physical threat to U.S. soldiers…

U.S. Military Uses New Laser Technology to Down ‘Cartel-Linked’ Drones
The operation was the first high-energy laser strike against cartel-linked drones, according to a statement from the U.S. Northern Command.

I had to walk home from work yesterday, an impromptu necessity and always a slog after a full day in a physical job - 40 minutes all slightly uphill 😐
As I walked through the industrial estate I spotted some gorgeous looking blackberries so I tried one and oh man they were good. So I scarfed a load of those and got a disgusted look from a passer by 😄
I'd decided I could have a choc milkshake from the local dairy's vending machine I walk past 10 mins in, and that was delic…

TIL: The BART expo fare now has a grace period of 30 minutes before it applies IF you are using open-loop or the newer physical media. If you're still on old media because that's the only thing that works on the Bike Share docks, you are SOL and have to call Clipper for the refund.

I'm surprised that after all this time there's still no way to make Linux maintain consistent /dev/whatever to physical storage device mappings. There are ALL KINDS of workarounds, like the /dev/disk/by-whatever tree and mounting with UUIDs, but nothing equivalent to what network devices have with `biosdevname`. Consequently, every time I boot my desktop, it's a toss-up if the boot drive will be /dev/nvme0 or /dev/nvme1. Purely cosmetic, but aggravating!

Matt LaFleur says he fully anticipates Packers keeping Josh Jacobs while charges are pending https://www.nfl.com/news/matt-lafleur-says-he-fully-anticipates-packers-keeping-josh-jacobs-while-charges-are-pending

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 1323 nodes and 5230 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

Leaked video from inside the concentration camp called the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana
I translated and added English subtitles to the original video. Please tell me if I made a mistake, I'm still learning Spanish.
Multiple woman report physical & sexual assault by officers.
Children taken away from mothers.
Officers expose detainees' private info so they can be trafficked.
Amputated toes off woman & didn't t…

2027 NFL Mock Draft Has Cowboys Landing Physical Georgia Linebacker https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/onsi/2027-nfl-mock-draft-dallas-cowboys-landing-physical-georgia-linebacker

Eagles, Raiders Receive Compelling Maxx Crosby Message https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/eagles-compelling-message-maxx-crosby/

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

Paint the Cameras Dead: Postcards for pushing back against surveillance. | Product Hunt
Not every project needs an app, an AI model or another screen. Paint the Cameras Dead is a physical set of postcards made for the street, not the cloud. Each card helps you notice surveillance cameras hiding in plain sight, ask who controls them and map what you find. Print them, share them, leave them in cafés, libraries or community spaces, and use them today. No download, no account, no update cycle. Just paper, attention and a small act of resistance.

Eliyan, which aims to license tech and make physical "chiplets" to ease AI chip data transfer bottlenecks, raised a $145M Series C at a $1B valuation (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/eliyan-ra

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

New 10x8" silver gelatin print. This one took a lot of refining, back and forth and test strips to achieve the right balance between brightness, contrast (esp. in the brighter parts of the clouds) and smooth mid-tone transitions. So even though this is a contact print from a digital negative, this was the first time in ages (i.e. decades) that I used some physical dodging to soften the horizon and emphasize the haze in the distance a tiny bit more...

Finally caught up with this two-year-old archive (🫣).
It'sage isn't relevant, as it talks about things that are unlikely to change: Your data is only yours if you also have it on physical media in your possession. (And stored there in open formats.)
Because services will come and go, promises will be forgotten, data loss will not cause more than a shy "sorry". Especially for free online services, but it also happens for paid services.

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…

Grand Theft Auto 6 Physical Copies Won't Include a Disc, Will Just Be a Code in a Box
Rockstar will sell physical copies of Grand Theft Auto 6 — though you'll only get a box containing a digital download code.

>Remote for TV box (from ISP, not TV itself) misses physical buttons.
>Need to go to AI trashbot for "assistance"
>AI trashbot: "Have you tried turning the receiver off and on?"
>"The physical buttons are gone..."
>AI trashbot: "That can be caused by an empty battery, please replace them and let me know!"

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 215 nodes and 405 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

An #acting #coaching client used the emotional/physical reality of their own day as a starting point for their character, and it was so interesting and fun. I'm a big fan of starting with what you have, and where you are, and letting that be some great raw material.

Industry insiders say Chinese robot makers currently rely on Nvidia silicon and software; Nvidia's physical AI business generates ~$10B in annual revenue (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/a…

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

'He's obviously physically unwell': Trump's facial 'drooping' singled out on MS NOW
After watching a montage of clips of Donald Trump dismissing American consumers’ economic woes, an MSNBC regular noted the president’s physical decline with a new observation.Speaking with host Jacob Soboroff, attorney George Conway claimed, “I hear a longstandingly mentally ill man, a narcissistic ...

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Knoebel/116818598997578427
That's why you buy DRM-free / physical media 🙂‍↕️

"ESA is closely monitoring the wildfire situation in the vicinity of its deep-space ground station in #Cebreros, Spain," says https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Corporate_news/ESA_statement_on_the_wildfires_near_Cebreros: "Based on the information currently available, the station appears to have remained unharmed. [...] All ESA personnel are safe and accounted for. [...] At present, ESA does not have physical access to the station and is therefore unable to conduct an on-site inspection."

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
…

On Semiconductor strikes $7 billion deal for Synaptics in physical AI push
On Semiconductor said the deal bumps up its total addressable market by $30 billion to $243 billion by 2030.

Yesterday we did our weekly errands again with our bicycle trolley. Works like a charm.
We select routes off major roads, have some chat along the way, see what's going on in town, physical exercise, fresh air, no fuel cost, no traffic jam.
And even car drivers are very friendly to us as well.

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 216 nodes and 259 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unweigh…

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 …

I never would have predicted that #2026 would be the year that:
- I get back to reading physical books.
- Buy a photo album.
- Order photos printed.
- Use an disposable analog camera.

It seems hard to believe that simply lying with your legs up the wall could make any difference to mental or physical health.

Zur Situation der Menschheit: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/physical-destruction.html

AI companies destroy physical books — let’s scan rare books before it’s too late
AI companies are secretly buying, scanning, and destroying millions of physical books to train their models, permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers. Anna’s Archive is urgently calling on volunteers worldwide to scan and upload books to their shadow library before this cultural heritage disappears forever.

Three Books on a Table
When this novel began, there were three physical books on my table, and none of them had anything to do with the others....
https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/24/three-books-on-a-table/

The Guardian's tech team share their shoe-leather experiences covering AI data centers, as field investigation becomes increasingly important in tech coverage (Gautam Malkani/The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/membership/202

‘These are some of the most complex structures ever created’: how tech reporting moved into the physical world
The Guardian’s global tech reporting team are investigating the impact of the vast datacentres being built to power the AI revolution. We spoke to them about how their beat has become increasingly offline

US senator Mitch McConnell is still not cleared to return to work, his office confirmed on Monday,
six weeks after he was hospitalized after a fall at his home.
An update released alongside a new photograph of the Republican lawmaker – one of the highest-profile figures in Congress, as a former Senate majority leader – said he was undergoing “intense physical therapy” and is “working hard” to get back to his duties.
In the statement, he said that he wouldn’t be able to make…

Mitch McConnell still not cleared to resume Senate duties, office says
Kentucky senator has been absent and not seen in public since mid-June after he was hospitalized due to a fall

OpenAI, Google, Meta, BlackRock, and others are recruiting electricians and carpenters by the thousands, with some of the highest pay the industry has ever seen (Lydia DePillis/New York Times)
https://www.ny…

A.I. Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters by the Thousands
The future of artificial intelligence depends on finding more skilled humans for some very physical jobs.

Why Your City Feels Built For Cars, Not People
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lauriewinkless/2026/07/24/why-your-city-feels-built-for-cars-not-people/

Why Your City Feels Built For Cars, Not People
A new book posits that physical space, rather than policy, is the primary constraint for urban transport. I speak to the authors to learn more.

From The Conversation
Where else can you peer into the labs and lecture halls of Canadian researchers and academics, who draw on their life's work to explain what being sedentary does to your body, why male chimps repeatedly throw rocks at trees and how the international legal order has collapsed?
We share their vast expert knowledge to educate Canadians so they can make informed decisions about politics, their health, the environment, the education of their children and the…

Not getting enough physical activity may be harming your health: Here’s what being sedentary does to your body
From a biological perspective, being inactive is more than the opposite of being active. Being sedentary results in unique physiological changes that can lead to a variety of health risks.

Packers RB Josh Jacobs facing misdemeanor charges of battery, criminal damage to property https://www.nfl.com/news/packers-rb-josh-jacobs-facing-misdemeanor-charges-of-battery-criminal-damage-to-property

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 believe they are put in containers in a warehouse in the East Bay:

How does Xbox grant full digital copies of store-bought games from physical media?
Every Xbox game disc has a secure, unique serial/ID courtesy of Xbox patent US20100228984A1, "Full-rights Local Playback of Digital Content".
You get all the benefits of digital media (speed, updateability & multiplatform access) while being able to still legally resell the game later or buy used copies.
#xbox #digitalmedia #physicaldisc

I think one of the most annoying things about our modern world is that even after you subscribe to a service, or even purchase a physical thing, you still get hit with shitty messages about "upgrading" and "subscribing" and like... fuck...
I've paid for a thing or subscribed to your service, but still you want more from me. More of my money, more of my time wasted, more annoyance.
I hate it. Hate it!

Physical Film Files
From the film itself, to the artwork, the packaging, and the special features—this is about celebrating movies the physical way...
Great Australian Pods Podcast Directory: https://www.greataustralianpods.com/physical-film-files/

Training Camp Notebook 8/18: Improvements made in physical joint practice with Houston Texans https://www.raiders.com/news/training-camp-notebook-8-18-physical-joint-practice-with-houston-texans-2026-preseason

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…

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

#today I have done supervision and will potter on with some #research, and also prepare to release one moderately physical product idea developed into the public domain with the help of my supervisors. Now off to lunch. My son is on campus this week for work experience, so I may bump into him...

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

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 692 nodes and 2426279 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Un…

The quality of images from digital cameras is inversely proportional to the physical size of the memory card used.
This Kodak DC50 uses PCMCIA (type I or II) cards

"Maybe I'll be okay using a touchpad without physical buttons if I try a macbook, since Apple pioneered that nonsense?"
Nope. I still want to throw this thing into a lake (but I can't, since it's not mine). It's sooo bad any time you want to do something even mildly complex, like hold down a button while dragging & dropping to copy a file between two file browser windows. I honestly don't understand how people put up with this.

Training Camp Notebook 8/18: Improvements made in physical joint practice with Houston Texans https://www.raiders.com/news/training-camp-notebook-8-18-physical-joint-practice-with-houston-texans-2026-preseason

VC funding in physical AI companies totaled $47.4B across 521 deals in H1, up 80% from H1 2025, and more than the $41.9B invested from 2022 to 2024 (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/physical-ai-funding-startups…

VCs Pour Billions Into Physical AI As The Next Wave Of AI Investing Takes Shape
In the first half of 2026, global venture funding in the physical AI space totaled $47.4 billion across 521 deals, per Crunchbase data. That’s up dramatically — almost 4x — compared to the second half of 2025 when startups in the sector raised $12 billion across 470 deals.

WaPo's opinion section has been promoting data centers, only sometimes mentioning owner Jeff Bezos' vested interest in them or the paper's OpenAI partnership (Paul Farhi/Washingtonian)
https://washingtonian.…

The Washington Post Loves Data Centers a Lot More Than Disclosing Jeff Bezos’ Financial Interest in Promoting Them - Washingtonian
The Washington Post’s opinion editors love data centers, the humongous and increasingly unpopular server warehouses that are the physical backbone of the internet and artificial intelligence. In unsigned editorials, podcasts, and guest op-ed columns, the Post’s take has been focused and forceful. America needs more data centers to boost the economy, compete with China, and

<re: games on disc>
"I want Xbox to be where the world plays. And... players love physical media & there's benefits to digital media & I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT PEOPLE HAVE A CHOICE IN THAT."
▶️ Xbox CEO on the "crisis" facing gaming hardware | BBC News
#xbox #ashasharma

"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

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…

Jeff Bezos's Prometheus raises $12B to build an 'artificial general engineer' for the physical world | TechCrunch
The new round values the physical AI startup that aims to automate heavy engineering and drug design at $41 billion.

Thanks to the #hiking community here, we now (almost) always have a water filter with us and we hardly dehydrated on our #cycling tours since.
I can barely say how good it feels to return without being terrible thirsty. Next issue I really need to solve is eating regularly and enough. Even though I had enough cereal bars with me, I more than once noticed hunger biting my stomach - and with this, a considerable drop of my physical performance.
But it was a lot of fun and joy nonetheless.

I grew up with 2 sisters. I never heard either of them discuss guys in physical/visual terms.
My first girlfriend, later my first wife, said she was first attracted to me because I looked “like a man” whatever that meant. It only took her 5 years of intermittent dating & 10 of marriage to decide that maybe that was a poor basis.
My last girlfriend, later & still my second/last wife, hadn’t see a photo of me when she deemed me suitable from afar in `98

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.

Nvidia unveils Cosmos 3 Edge, a world model designed for robots and vision AI agents to perceive and navigate physical environments in real time (Jenny Lee/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/16/nvidia-reveals-new-ai-model-and-expands-…

Nvidia unveils new AI model and expands Japan’s physical AI ecosystem
Nvidia announces new AI model, Cosmos 3 Edge, and expansion of its physical AI ecosystems in Japan.

Last year, we covered how Anthropic was buying physical books,
scanning them,
and destroying them to feed their Claude chatbot.
Judge William Alsup ruled this fair use.
In particular, he said mulching the books was perfectly fine because making them digital was
“exceedingly transformative”: [Order on Fair Use, 2025, PDF]
The print original was destroyed.
One replaced the other.
And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, s…

AI vendors are destroying rare books to feed the chatbot
Every AI vendor trains their chatbots on the Common Crawl, a copy of the whole public internet. But that’s just the starting point. AI vendors are desperate for more data — in the hope of making th…

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

THIS.
Xbox owners get digital copies of 1000s of supported Xbox game discs... STARTING THIS WEEK.
Activate your digital copy & get universal access to the game on Xbox, PC, mobile, or cloud gaming.
Sell the game on eBay? The physical & digital rights transfer to the new owner.
▶️ Xbox’s 2009 patent just became PlayStation’s nightmare...
#xbox #digital #physicalmedia

Germany's Black Forest Labs launches Flux 3 and Flux-mimic, its first models for robotics, as it expands from generative AI into physical AI (Yazhou Sun/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-0…

We expected rain (but no ⚡⛈️).
So we got our jackets, did our errands with our little bike trailer - and were lucky because it didn't even rain 💪
✅ Saved fuel again
✅ Physical activity
✅ Faster way to detach from work
✅ Saw a couple of cats
Totally recommended!
#cycling #BikeTooter

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 692 nodes and 2426279 edges.
Tags: Social, Offline, Un…

Had an #acting #coaching client make a single physical change be the focus of a take and shot to see and hear their voice expand into the character in a whole new way. So good to hear their voice more fully animate the moments with new depths.

Ahahhaha just because I verified that the pixel 10 comes with a physical sim card slot doesn't mean that it actually comes with a physical sim card slot*. I fucking despise Pixel hardware from the very core of my being.
* turns out it comes with a sim card slot everywhere else except the US

A hacker known as Cyberleek leaks two GTA VI gameplay clips and the full map in protest of Rockstar Games' digital-only release; Rockstar issues DMCA takedowns (Jowi Morales/Tom's Hardware)
https://www.

Hacker leaks GTA VI gameplay and map to protest digital-only release — claims pre-orders are a legacy of physical game releases
The hacker wants Rockstar to stop pre-selling digital games.

Cowboys' Brian Schottenheimer hints at more physical training camp ahead https://www.sportingnews.com/ca/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-brian-schottenheimer-padded-practices-oxnard/e00c3a30ef702b47e58df24b…

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-…

NFL news roundup: Cowboys WR George Pickens reports for physical ahead of mandatory minicamp https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-news-roundup-latest-league-updates-from-monday-june-15

Former Alibaba star researcher Junyang Lin launches Shanghai-based Pragmatik Labs to build digital and physical AI agents; Pragmatik hit a $2B valuation in June (Juro Osawa/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/f

Former Alibaba Researcher Announces New Startup on Digital and Physical AI Agents
Former Alibaba star researcher Junyang Lin announced that he had started a new AI company, confirming The Information’s earlier reports. Lin, who left Alibaba in March, said in a post on X that his Shanghai-based startup, Pragmatik Labs, is focusing on “next-generation agents across digital and physical worlds.” Lin also said Chinese venture capital firms Gaorong Ventures and HongShan led

Exploring a scene with an #acting #coaching client, we tried 3 different physical changes/postures. We discovered very cool changes in intention, the relationship and the whole tone, including a nice underlying friendship the characters have through it.

A U.S. appeals court has ruled in a case involving Exxon Mobil that the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration
cannot require businesses to document work-related mental illnesses reported by employees.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said on Tuesday
that a requirement in federal law that ‌employers periodically report work-related deaths, injuries and illnesses only applies to physical -- and not mental c…

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…

Elio, which is developing a new type of image sensor designed for AI rather than human vision, raised a $21M Series A led by Innovation Endeavors and Xora (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/rkhattyhzl

Former Meta AR/VR executives raise $21 million to build sensors for the AI era
Elio's founders, Nadav Grossinger and Nitay Romano, spent seven years developing physical sensing systems at Meta. Now they are betting that artificial intelligence needs a fundamentally different way to see the world. 

Seattle-based Augmodo, whose AI-powered "Smartbadges" worn by employees track shelf inventory, raised $21M led by TQ Ventures at a $350M valuation (Kurt Schlosser/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2026/augmodo-rais

Augmodo raises $21M to push its spatial AI beyond just retail toward the broader physical workforce
Customer demand is pulling the Seattle startup's technology into warehouses, facility maintenance, delivery, and other parts of the physical workforce.

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

Alibaba eyes physical world with its first suite of AI models for robots
Alibaba unveils Qwen robot models to push AI beyond chatbots, as embodied intelligence becomes the next frontier in global AI.

"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

Federal agents across the United States were told in recent days that the FBI will no longer investigate physical confrontations involving Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
The guidance was shared with FBI managers on Thursday, with some ICE agents notified by their FBI counterparts the same day.
The Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security issued a joint statement denying that any change had taken place.
They insisted the relationship between …

FBI Told to Stop Investigating ICE After Patel Halted Renee Good Probe, Now ICE Investigates Itself
The FBI will no longer investigate ICE confrontations, shifting responsibility to Homeland Security Investigations. This change raises concerns about accountability and scrutiny of ICE's use of force.

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

Google Store Tokyo to be first physical store outside US, opens this summer
After being exclusive to the United States, the first physical Google Store outside of the region is coming to Tokyo, Japan, this summer.

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 387 nodes and 1477 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

Source: robotics startup Generalist, which released its GEN-1 model to complete physical tasks in April, raised ~$200M led by 8VC, after raising $400M in June (Dan Primack/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/24/robotics-ai-generalist-200m

Scoop: Generalist raises another $200 million for AI robotics
This comes just weeks after it raised $400 million at a $2 billion valuation.

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

SoftBank chipmaker Arm hits 50% share in top AI data centers: exec
AI boom drives demand for company's architecture as it also moves into physical chips

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 186 nodes and 361 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

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 1369 nodes and 6629 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

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)

Xbox testing disc-to-digital feature that digitizes a physical game collection
Microsoft’s disc-to-digital feature could be essential for next-gen Xbox consoles.

Sources: Veeda, which is developing world models and is led by ex-Nvidia VP of AI Research Sanja Fidler, raised a $90M seed and is backed by Khosla and Radical (Murad Hemmadi/The Logic)
https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/veeda-ai-sanja-fidler-nvidia/

Star researcher Sanja Fidler raises over US$90M for world model startup - The Logic
Toronto-based Veeda is building control systems for physical AI, and is backed by Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, The Logic has learned

Velaura AI, which is developing low-power chips for data centers and physical AI applications, like robotics, raised a $110M Series A at a $1B valuation (Prathik Jayaprakash/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactiona

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…

AI coding agents taught robots how to install GPUs and cut zip-ties
NVIDIA’s self-improvement program for robots enlists teams of AI coding agents.

XDOF, which is building data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for robot training data, emerges from stealth with $70M (Tim Fernholz/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/17/colle…

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it. | TechCrunch
If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there's a data problem that needs to be solved.