The NFL has rescinded the $14,926 fine it imposed on 49ers FB Kyle “Juice” Juszczyk for what it thought was a distasteful celebration of chugging a beer. The league said it was withdrawing the fine “because his celebration was simulating drinking a juice box, not a beer….Mr. Juszczyk finally stated that the fine is hypocritical with the amount of Bud Light sponsorships surrounding the NFL.” Fine rescinded.

Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models “I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. “With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor. “You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something. “That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’ “I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”

BREAKING: Patrick Collison just told the Valley exactly where the next Stripe gets built. And it's not an AI lab. Asked what he'd build if starting from scratch, Collison pointed directly at legacy vertical software — decades-old systems still running healthcare, logistics, construction, finance. Entire industries. Still on 1990s infrastructure. Every ambitious founder is chasing foundation models right now. Collison is pointing at the opposite end of the stack. The most defensible businesses often come from the places everyone else decides are too boring to touch. Is the Valley sleeping on the biggest opportunity in software right now?

🚨 BREAKING: Minerva Humanoids (@mnv_humanoids) has just emerged from stealth with $10M in pre-seed funding led by @generalcatalyst. It's building humanoid robots for the world's most dangerous jobs. Oil and gas. Explosive ordnance disposal. Hazardous material response. ☢️ Every 75 minutes, an energy worker somewhere in the world is killed on the job. That's roughly 7,000 deaths a year. NATO consistently identifies EOD and hazmat response teams as the highest-risk segment in every unit, relying on decades-old wheeled, single-arm robots that simply lack the dexterity for complex tasks. Minerva's answer is Roger, a purpose-built semi-autonomous humanoid that puts the specialist's judgment and hands on the task while keeping their body in a command post far from the danger. Founded by CEO Sandor Felber and CTO Maurice Rahme, with first paid pilots launching this fall. The investor lineup is strong with General Catalyst, @LongJourneyVC, @CredoVentures, MVP Ventures, and many other cool funds! I am proud to be among the angel investors in this round! 😇 Having spent more than 2 years deploying robots in the energy and oil & gas sector, I know firsthand how real this problem is, and how hard it is to solve. Minerva is going after exactly the right market, with exactly the right approach. This is the kind of company robotics was always supposed to build! 🛢️ 🔗 Read more here: finance.yahoo.com/technology… ~~   ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

I've found that investors have a hard time investing in highly complex businesses because they're hard to understand. The ironic thing is that hugely correlates with the potential for building a moat.

I will die on this hill: you simply cannot be a great founder and great investor at the same time. The way you think about everything in life as a great investor is orthogonal to being a great founder. You don’t have an unbiased objective view of the world as a founder.