Tootfinder

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.

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

This humanoid robotics company is going public, but its CEO isn't promising a robot in your home anytime soon | TechCrunch
While other humanoid startups chase sky-high valuations, Agility Robotics is betting its future on execution — and a SPAC.

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…

Tesla's Robotaxis Are a Complete Disaster
Behind the scenes, the reality is that Tesla's much-hyped Robotaxi program sounds like an absolute hot mess.

Decided to read Lord of the Rings again which I also have as physical book ... oh heck I wish I could increase the font size!

I only got 25% of an idea what to do with the amount of abrupt physical artistic freedom I'm about to have. If there's something u think I might wear, or something u think I might have in my room, show it to me

RE: #ShapePacking...

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…

Time and Self are inextricably linked
In Search of Now, by Jo Marchant
P.188-9
What, when, where, why, and how is “Now” a thing?
I’ve thought and read a lot about how our minds work, what they are, why they’re necessary, are they necessary? And still Marchant manages to explode my understanding of it all. #recommended

Been a rough time, of late, dealing with parental health decline... physical and mental. I've been withdrawn as a coping mechanism, BUT one joy I have had is channeling some time into some self-hosting projects. Been a bit therapeutic, really.
Yesterday I pulled down all my audiobooks from Audible, converted them to m4b files and propped up an instance of audiobookshelf.

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/

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.

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

Radiometric Thermal Imaging Dataset of Laboratory Rats with Anatomical Segmentation Masks
Dima Bykhovsky, Evyatar Chaimoff, Pe'er Eden, Tom Simkin, Oshrit Hoffer, Shahar Cohen, Bar Eilat Yogev, Gal Levi, Noa Efroni, Doron Todder, Hagit Cohen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.03481 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.03481 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.03481
arXiv:2608.03481v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Infrared thermography provides a contact-free, restraint-free method to record surface temperatures. It serves as a valuable marker for thermoregulatory responses in laboratory animal stress and pharmacology research. However, the analysis of these images is currently bottlenecked by the manual delineation of anatomical regions. To date, no public dataset has provided paired radiometric thermal frames of rats with pixel-level body-part labels. We present a dataset of 1,655 quality-controlled radiometric thermal frames from 25 laboratory rats. Each frame is paired with a dense four-class anatomical segmentation mask (background, head, body, and tail) and the raw $480 \times 640$ temperature matrix (rows $\times$ columns) in degrees Celsius. This ensures every label is registered directly to the physical temperature it describes rather than a color-mapped rendering. The frames originate from two pharmacological cohorts where interventions alter thermoregulation in opposite directions: ethanol, which induces peripheral vasodilation, and ketamine, which affects central thermoregulation. This provides a wide and physiologically diverse range of surface temperature regimes. Aggregated across the dataset, the per-class temperatures follow a head~$>$~body~$>$~tail ordering in physical units. To demonstrate that the data support pixel-level segmentation directly from the radiometric channel, we present an exploratory U-Net segmentation pipeline that attains a subject-level cross-validated mean intersection-over-union of $0.895 \pm 0.006$. The dataset provides a reuse-ready benchmark for thermal semantic segmentation and for downstream physiological and stress-phenotyping analyses.
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…

Decided to read Lord of the Rings again which I also have as physical book ... oh heck I wish I could increase the font size!

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.

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

Sony Removes Hundreds of Purchased PlayStation Store Movies From Customer Libraries
Sony will remove hundreds of purchased PlayStation Store movies due to licensing agreements, raising fresh concerns over digital ownership rights.

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…

Ashton Jeanty: 'We're going to be the most conditioned team, most physical team https://www.raiders.com/video/ashton-jeanty-we-re-going-to-be-the-most-conditioned-team-most-physical-team-and-we-re-g…

Strategic Evaluation of Planning Strategies for LLM Agents in Cyber-Physical Systems
J. de Curt\`o, I. de Zarz\`a
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04265 https://…

"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

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

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.

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 2640 nodes and 4268 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unwei…

Is Dark Matter Really Matter?
Jun-Qian Jiang, Arman Shafieloo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.04763 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.04763 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.04763
arXiv:2608.04763v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In the standard model of cosmology, it is assumed that dark matter is pressureless with equation of state $w=0$ and dark energy has $w=-1$. We test these assumptions jointly using DESI DR2 distance measurements, including the recent Lyman-$\alpha$ full-shape Alcock-Paczynski (AP) information, DES supernovae, and two complementary CMB treatment. When constant $w_{dm}$ and $w_{de}$ are varied together, we find $w_{dm}=0.000968^{ 0.000501}_{-0.000496}$ and $w_{de}=-0.9380^{ 0.0259}_{-0.0262}$ (68%). With an alternative CMB treatment that marginalizes over the lensing spectrum, the corresponding constraints are $w_{dm}=0.000870^{ 0.000408}_{-0.000410}$ and $w_{de}=-0.9353^{ 0.0258}_{-0.0254}$. Both standard $\Lambda$CDM values are disfavored at approximately $2\sigma$ in the joint extension. Neither parameter departs significantly from its standard value when only that parameter is varied. This behavior arises because late-time distances favor $w_{de}>-1$, while maintaining the early-Universe physical matter density requires a compensating positive $w_{dm}$, which changes the mapping to the matter density today. Allowing dynamical dark energy clarify further on complexity of the situation: phantom crossing for dark energy makes $w_{dm}=0$ consistent with the data, whereas a positive $w_{dm}$ preference persists when crossing is forbidden. Interestingly, the Pad'e-$w$ parameterization that provides a flexible description of a class of quintessence models (with no phantom crossing), along with $w_{dm}$ free, is even mildly favored over the phantom-crossing $w_0w_a$ model according to both the best-fit $\chi^2$ and the DIC under both CMB treatments. One can conclude that the apparent preference for phantom crossing may instead reflect deviations in the dark-matter sector rather than dark-energy dynamics alone. [abridged]
toXiv_bot_toot

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.

RIAA: US recorded music revenue rose 6.9% YoY to $6B in H1 2026; physical grew 25.9% to $731.5M, driven by a 58.6% jump in CDs, and streaming rose 4.7% to $4.9B (Anzar Mehraj/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telec…

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.

Xbox One loses some disc-free play, family game-sharing plan with revised policies

Peptides adopt stable omega-loop structures in concentrated sulfuric acid: #Venus.

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

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.

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 🫂

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.

FYI, from now until midnight (CST) Sunday, all physical items in the Elevator Bath catalog are 25% off with code AUGUST. If you want recommendations, lemme know. https://elevatorbath.bandcamp.com/music

Elevator Bath
Elegant abstract music. Since 1998. Distributed by Clandestine → https://clandestinedistribution.com/ Not currently accepting demos.

For a physical website, I'd wish they would not write "creates energy" but rather "releases" *sigh*. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-nepal-devastating-wont-region-mountains.html

Nepal's devastating floods won't be the last as the region's mountains heat up
On the morning of Aug. 26, a section of mountain near Langtang Lirung peak in Nepal suddenly collapsed.

Serial sexual abuser Donald Trump stopped short of calling on Rep Max Miller to resign Monday,
saying he would “let the families figure that out”.
Asked whether the Ohio Republican should step down following allegations of domestic abuse from his ex-wife, Emily Moreno,
Trump said he has always known Miller as “a good person” and called the situation “a very sad thing.”
The abuse allegations, which include physical abuse of Moreno and their two-year-old daughter,

Trump declines to call for Max Miller’s resignation amid abuse allegations – live
President says he will ‘let the families figure that out’ and calls situation ‘a very sad thing’ when asked if Ohio Republican should step down

In a rare interview, Huawei chip scientist Liao Heng warns Western chip companies will eventually face physical chip limits and talks Huawei's Tau Scaling Law (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-0…

A Scoping Review of Physics Informed Machine Learning for Wave Propagation Modeling in Seismology
\'Oscar Rinc\'on-Carde\~no, Gregorio P\'erez-Bernal, Silvana Montoya-Noguera, Nicol\'as Guar\'in-Zapata
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00178 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.00178 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.00178
arXiv:2607.00178v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: \emph{Background:} Standard numerical methods accurately simulate seismic waves but are computationally expensive, particularly for inverse problems. Machine learning approaches have been proposed as alternatives that can reduce computational cost while maintaining acceptable physical accuracy. \emph{Objective:} To map how physics-informed machine learning methods have been applied to seismic wave propagation modeling based on partial differential equations. \emph{Methods:} A scoping review was conducted using the OpenAlex and Scopus databases. Selected studies were classified by problem type (forward or inverse) and machine learning strategy to identify research trends, methodological patterns, and gaps in the literature. \emph{Results:} Physics-informed machine learning has been applied to both forward modeling and inversion in seismology, often reaching accuracy comparable to standard numerical methods at lower computational cost. Application of three mechanisms for incorporating physical knowledge were identified: observational bias, inductive bias, and learning bias. To evaluate methodological reproducibility of a representative method, the original PINN framework was replicated in PyTorch, obtaining results consistent with and in most cases more accurate than those originally reported. From the reviewed literature, limitations remain in benchmarking consistency, training cost, and scalability to three-dimensional and experimentally validated problems. \emph{Conclusions:} Standard numerical methods remain the basis of seismological workflows, while physics-informed machine learning offers complementary approaches that are useful for inverse problems and surrogate modeling. Future work should focus on consistent benchmarking, hybrid formulations, and validation under realistic geophysical conditions.
toXiv_bot_toot

from my link log —
Are aerospike engines better than traditional rocket engines?
https://everydayastronaut.com/aerospikes/
saved 2019-10-19 https://

Are Aerospike Engines Better Than Traditional Rocket Engines?
Today we’re going to look at the history of aerospike engines, go over how nozzles work including things like overexpansion, underexpansion and even expansion ratios, we’ll look at the pros and cons of the aerospike, the physical limitations and problems, then we’ll compare the aerospike to some other traditional rocket engines. But that’s not all, I obtained never seen before photos and videos of some aerospikes, we’ll get opinions from some people who have actually worked with aeros…

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

"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

I find myself thinking about accessibility a lot, and it was hard to not be very annoyed by the truly awful yellow-on-white text here:
https://www.simplypsychology.org/blooms-taxonomy.html
I genuinely can't read that. And it's on a psychology web site -- psych …

Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning | Domain Levels Explained
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a widely recognized hierarchical framework used by educators to classify and structure educational objectives according to their complexity and specificity. This taxonomy encompasses three primary domains: cognitive (intellectual processes), affective (emotional responses and attitudes), and psychomotor (physical skills and abilities).

Btw countries do not celebrate their “birthdays” or anniversaries (as they’re non-physical made-up things), people do (some people).

>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!"

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/

Shared Memory for R Objects
Share R objects across processes on the same machine via a single copy in POSIX shared memory (Linux, macOS) or a Win32 file mapping (Windows). Every process reads from the same physical pages through the R Alternative Representation (ALTREP) framework, giving lazy, zero-copy access. Shared objects serialize compactly as their shared memory name rather than their full contents.

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.

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…

Joint elastic full waveform inversion of multi-component geophone and distributed acoustic sensing data
Hoang Anh Nguyen, Ali Tura
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01649 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.01649 https://arxiv.org/html/2607.01649
arXiv:2607.01649v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Joint full waveform inversion (FWI) of distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and ocean-bottom node (OBN) data typically requires converting measured strain to particle velocity, introducing numerical noise and spectral distortion. To eliminate this, we present an elastic multi-parameter FWI framework using a velocity-stress-strain (VSS) formulation that directly models pressure, particle velocity, and gauge-length-averaged DAS strain from a single forward simulation. Data residuals are injected additively into a single backward simulation, making computational cost independent of the active sensor subsets. We benchmark individual and combined datasets on cross-talk and elastic Marmousi models. Our results show that joint inversion recovers elastic parameters more accurately than single deployments when the sensors offer complementary information. Specifically, pairing two-component geophones with a deviated borehole DAS cable yields the most accurate parameter recovery and mitigates inter-parameter cross-talk by providing a distinct physical observable and complementary depth aperture. We release our implementation as xFWI, an open-source, Devito-based Python package for scalable, multi-deployment inversions.
toXiv_bot_toot

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I like my physical PC release of GTA V, btw 😁🥰

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

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

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…

Sony will cease production of discs for new PlayStation games in 2028
The end of an era, a potential fatal blow to video games as physical media, and a hint of what’s in store for the PS6? Also: PS3/Vita online stores scheduled for shutdown.

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

Had an #acting #coaching client do a physical rehearsal technique I sometimes use, and immediately their upper spine changed and their voice shifted really nicely. Next take after the technique: the change partly remained, clarifying things as I'd hoped. Satisfying.

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 806 nodes and 1701 edges.
Tags: Biological, Protein interactions

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

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...

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.

Researchers used AI-assisted code to undetectably tamper with data from computerized scans of physical DNA evidence produced by widely used crime-lab machines (Mariah Timms/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.…

"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

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 …

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.

"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

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

CarbonSix Raises $40M in Series A Funding
CarbonSix, Inc., a San Francisco, CA-based Physical AI company focused on the manufacturing sector, raised $40m (approx. KRW 60 billion) in Series A funding

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 ...

PSI, which aims to use AI "to industrialize the discovery of new physics" including cracking interstellar travel, emerges from stealth with a $58M seed (Sabrina Ortiz/The Deep View)
https://www.thedeepview.com/articles/can-ai-crack-interstellar-travel…

Can AI help crack interstellar travel?
AI is best known for transforming coding. Now, one startup is making the case for physics. On Tuesday, the AI-native physics research lab, Physical Superintell...

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 367 nodes and 398 edges.
Tags: Biological, Gene regulation, Protein interactions, Unweigh…

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.

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.

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…

Foundational Industries, which aims to build AI-run factories for physical products, starting with custom data center rack enclosures, raised a $25M seed (Lily Mae Lazarus/Fortune)
https://fortune.com/2026/07/30/forget-

Forget robots on assembly lines. Foundational Industries wants AI to run the entire factory
The startup says software-native factories can leapfrog China’s highly automated manufacturing base rather than trying to replicate it.

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.

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

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

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

Japan backs SoftBank-led AI models with up to $6.2bn in chasing US, China
New company will focus on physical AI using data from Japanese companies

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…

Google DeepMind releases Gemini Robotics 2, which combines several different AI models into a single system to control a range of robots, including humanoids (Will Knight/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/google-gemini-can-control-humanoid-robots/

Gemini Robotics 2 Brings Google's AI Into the Physical World
The latest version of Google DeepMind's AI model includes a significant jump into “physical AGI.” But plopping AI into the real world comes with risks.

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…

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.

"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

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.

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-…

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.

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…

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…

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

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.

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. 

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

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.