70 HashiCorp sessions. 35 HashiCorp hands-on labs. 105 total opportunities to learn more about Terraform, Vault, AI operations, hybrid cloud, identity security and more. 🥳 Attend sessions at HashiConf and IBM TechXchange like... 💸 FinOps and cloud cost discipline 🛠️ Day 2 operations with Terraform and Vault 🔐 Securing AI agents and machine identities ☁️ Running AI workloads across hybrid cloud environments 🛡️ Quantum readiness 🌳 IT efficiency and sustainability Get your ticket now:

I love adaptive reuse. At 150 Hayes, they are turning an ugly vacant office building to a beautiful 105-unit residential building (1,2,3 BR's) for ~$350/sf (construction cost) + $225/sf (acquisition cost). The project only pencils because SF waived affordable-housing requirements for office-to-resi conversions. $575/sf (construction + acquisition cost) seems like a pretty good deal for what looks like a nice building. The same guys did a great job on 100 Van Ness.

👶 Total weeks of paid leave for new parents: 1. 🇸🇰 Slovakia: 192 2. 🇫🇮 Finland: 177 3. 🇭🇺 Hungary: 171 4. 🇰🇷 South Korea: 119 5. 🇱🇻 Latvia: 105 6. 🇳🇴 Norway: 101 7. 🇱🇹 Lithuania: 92 8. 🇬🇷 Greece: 92 9. 🇪🇪 Estonia: 87 10. 🇱🇺 Luxembourg: 74 11. 🇦🇹 Austria: 73 12. 🇫🇷 France: 72 13. 🇨🇿 Czechia: 71 14. 🇸🇪 Sweden: 70 15. 🇩🇪 Germany: 67 16. 🇯🇵 Japan: 66 17. 🇵🇱 Poland: 63 18. 🇸🇮 Slovenia: 63 19. 🇮🇹 Italy: 63 20. 🇨🇦 Canada: 56 21. 🇧🇪 Belgium: 54 22. 🇵🇹 Portugal: 53 23. 🇩🇰 Denmark: 52 24. 🇮🇸 Iceland: 52 25. 🇮🇪 Ireland: 42 26. 🇬🇧 UK: 41 27. 🇳🇱 Netherlands: 40 28. 🇪🇸 Spain: 32 29. 🇨🇱 Chile: 31 30. 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 26 31. 🇨🇴 Colombia: 21 32. 🇦🇺 Australia: 20 33. 🇨🇷 Costa Rica: 19 34. 🇹🇷 Türkiye: 17 35. 🇨🇭 Switzerland: 16 36. 🇮🇱 Israel: 15 37. 🇲🇽 Mexico: 12 38. 🇺🇸 USA: 0 The OECD average is 65 weeks, counting maternity, paternity and shared leave combined. Slovakia, Finland and Hungary each offer more than three years, mostly as long shared leave that either parent can take. South Korea stands out with 54 weeks reserved for fathers, the most of any country. These figures show how long leave lasts, not how much it pays. Much of the longest leave is paid at low flat rates, while shorter schemes are often closer to full salary. The US is the only OECD country with no national paid parental leave. Source: OECD, 2024 data

This robot is skateboarding completely blind. And yes... It’s autonomous. No vision or markers. Just proprioception, joint torques and some very clever state estimation. Aditya Bhatt (PhD at IAS / DFKI under Jan Peters) just dropped one of the wildest robot demos of the year. People in the comments are already losing it over the same questions: How the hell does it know where the deck is? Pure IMU? Contact models? What observations is the policy actually getting at inference time? They only trigger the tricks like a real-life video game. This is coming straight out of @Jan_R_Peters’ lab, @ias_tudarmstadt. The same Jan Peters who just sat down for a long, unusually honest interview about how German red tape cost the field a full five-year head start on humanoids. If you’re into real robot learning (not just pretty videos), both are worth your time. Skateboarder demo and work by @aditya_bhatt. Podcast: Ep 105 | Red Tape Cost Us a 5-Year Lead in Humanoid Robotics (w/ Jan Peters) Huge thanks to Jan Peters for the rare honesty, his humour and insights into the world of robotics and his own! Full Conversation: On Spotify: On YouTube:

Everything I read out of CIOE this week was a seller talking. $LITE on laser power tiers, $COHR on ultra-high-power ramps, $POET on 6.4T, Sivers on price rises. So I went looking for a buyer, and found one who had already answered the central question in public, in May, and answered it the other way. The sellers' position, from Lumentum management at a broker conference on 9 September: "There's a great concern what happens to the laser when it's so close to the heat source … there's a strong desire to move the laser outside." Two reasons for keeping the light source external. Reliability, and heat. Chen Qin, optical network architect at Alibaba Cloud, speaking at an xPO forum in Shanghai on 28 May, in remarks the CIOE organisers published themselves: deployment of 400G and 800G optical modules, now in the tens of millions, has thoroughly validated laser reliability. The spread of liquid cooling has effectively resolved the thermal bottleneck. NPO and CPO, in his words, now fully possess the objective conditions for putting the laser inside. He then called on the industry to push laser integration forward together. Translation mine. Both of the seller's reasons, marked settled by the customer, fifteen weeks earlier. That is the part worth sitting with, because the external light source story is load-bearing right now. It is the reason indium phosphide capacity is being prepaid years out, the reason a 70 mW part and a 400 mW part are suddenly different businesses, the reason anyone is modelling ELS modules as a separate line at all. His architecture choice is more specific than the headline. Scale-out keeps pluggables, with OSFP iterating. Scale-up moves to near-package or co-packaged, and at 224G per lane and below he says NPO has ample headroom and can fully reuse the existing supply chain. CPO he calls the long-term direction, with its current obstacles named as immaturity and single-vendor lock-in. That last phrase explains something I wrote about earlier this week. If the buyer's stated problem with co-packaged optics is being locked to one vendor, then a group of suppliers writing a common pluggable socket for optical engines is not a standards exercise. It is the answer to a customer objection. And the dates do not line up the way the market has them. Alibaba Cloud lit the first 3.2T NPO system to the OIF standard at the end of 2025, plans small-volume deployment at the end of this year and volume deployment next year. Its 6.4T UPO work expects system bring-up in the second half of this year and beta by year end. Against that, CPO was dated this month by three separate parties to the end of 2027 at the earliest. Near-package is roughly a year ahead, on the customer's own calendar. What I would not do is over-read one buyer. This is a single hyperscaler, in China, with its own silicon and its own supply constraints, and the US hyperscalers sit inside a different vendor ecosystem. It was also May, and plans stated in May are not deliveries. But nobody has publicly walked it back, and the supplier arguments this week were made as though the objection had never been raised. What would change my read: a Western hyperscaler putting a comparable schedule on record, either way. Also worth watching whether VCSEL-based designs gain ground, since he specifically noted they support an internal laser and need no polarisation-maintaining fibre, which removes two of the cost lines the external route carries. Friday's close: $LITE 931.68, $COHR 305.21, $POET 8.01, $AAOI 105.89, $AXTI 66.06.

Internet video is now robot training data! 🛜 @perceptroninc, the startup from the ex-Meta team behind the Chameleon multimodal models, just released Isaac 0.5, an open-source embodied foundation model. The same weights answer questions about a video, point to objects, track them over time, report task progress, and generate the robot's actions. What it learns from perception directly shapes what it does. To make a big model run fast enough for control, they built on something called Null Experts: each token can pick how many experts it activates, so the model spends more compute on hard parts of a scene and coasts through the easy ones. → 36B-parameter sparse model, trained across 35+ robot systems and 3T multimodal tokens → 62.6 on ScreenSpot-Pro grounding vs 54.8 for the strongest Qwen3-VL run → Does it at ~8.5× lower inference cost, 26.9 TFLOP per request against 228.4 → On a chess-manipulation task, one epoch on a single episode cut action loss 10.5× Perception and action sharing one brain, with compute that flexes to the task, that's a genuinely different shape for a robot model. And it's fully open, weights, training code, inference via LeRobot. Here's the blog: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

The Season 10.5 Roadmap is here, Rivals! 🗺️ Take a sneak peek at all the new content heading your way, including new costumes, events, and MORE! Embrace the darkness and welcome the undead as we gear up for a spooky season! *Maintenance will begin on October 9th, 9 AM UTC, and is expected to take approximately 2 hours. *Please note that servers will be offline during this period, and the game will be inaccessible. *Server return times may vary based on progress. Stay tuned for updates; we'll announce when they're back up on all social platforms!

Adjustable-rate mortgages accounted for 10.5% of mortgage applications for week ended Oct. 9, the largest share in a year, reflecting affordability concerns and  higher borrowing costs @MBAmortgage

Gear up for Season 10.5! 👑 Tune in to your favorite Marvel Rivals streams on Twitch to earn exclusive free rewards, including Angela's Spray, Nameplate, Emote, and her stunning new costume! Available from Oct 9, 12 PM UTC to Nov 6, 9 AM UTC! Don't miss out!