Kostiantyn Vlasenko, a 49-year-old soldier, endured one of the longest Ukrainian deployments along the frontlines of the conflict against Russia. The area is known as the kill zone because of the vast armies of drones swarming the skies. Nowhere is safe

Do robot VLAs really need a separate vision encoder? From Pixels to Actions: Towards Native Vision-Language-Action Policies NEO-VLA is a 2B encoder-free VLA built directly on pixels and words. 🧱 Highlight 1: a unified backbone with no encoder Instead of CLIP or SigLIP, a light convolutional patch embedder feeds image tokens into the same 40-layer decoder as the text. On LIBERO average with a frozen backbone, Qwen3-VL-2B scores 79.5 and NEO-VLA 90.9. 🔍 Highlight 2: the action expert reads intermediate layers A flow-matching expert attends to keys and values from middle layers of the backbone. With a frozen backbone, reading early layers is strongest (94.9); after fine-tuning, a layer mix reaches 95.3. But wiring the expert to an encoder-based model's intermediate features drops frozen performance from 79.5 to 64.9, so the pretraining seems to matter. 🧠 Highlight 3: co-training with understanding data Action-only fine-tuning gives 10.7% on RoboTwin 2.0 and loses the ability to output text. Mixing in understanding data reaches 69.4% and keeps VQA scores within about 1.5 points. LIBERO hits 97.4, but it's weak when objects or goals change (LIBERO-Pro: position 3.0, task 6.3), and the real-robot evaluation is small: 3 tasks, 20 trials each. #VLA# #Robotics#

Ukrainian soldier Kostiantyn Vlasenko spent 491 days trapped in the drone-filled "kill zone," and months hiding in a hole when he lost both feet after a Russian attack

Ukrainian soldier Kostiantyn Vlasenko was huddled in a hole under the boiler of a bombed-out school when he came to a terrifying conclusion: To survive, he must amputate his only remaining foot. He survived

a fake token called Vladhood did a $10m market cap last week because the post came from the Robinhood CEO's account. 175,000 people saw it in under 20 minutes. wallets that got in early pulled more than $1m out of the pump, and as of the reporting nobody had identified who they belong to. Robinhood's answer: the account was compromised, the post has been removed. that's the whole consequence. no fine, no refund, nobody asking how the fuck a public company CEO loses his X account in the middle of a memecoin frenzy running on his own chain. and that's just the one that made headlines. smaller accounts get taken every day, push a contract address or a drainer link to their followers, and close it out with the same three lines. heads up, we were compromised, access restored, stay safe. so when the whole thing costs the owner of the account nothing, is it really believable that nobody has ever staged one of these on purpose? I'm not putting a name on anybody. I'm asking why anyone would leave that much free money sitting there. BNB Chain is the one exception I can remember. users lost $8k to phishing links in October and the team paid every one of them back. locking an X account down is five minutes. password manager, hardware key, kill the connected apps you approved in 2021 and forgot about. make the reach carry the liability and watch how fast the hardware keys show up.