Linkblog · synced
Dipping the Stacks
A rolling window of my 100 most recent bookmarks. Bookmarking since 2006: Delicious → Pinboard → Raindrop.
https://links.thejaymo.net/rss
Today 10
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youtube.com
Agentworld x Superdark Factory — Antikythera x Disintegrator
A double-lecture by Benjamin Bratton (Antikythera) and Marek Poliks (Disintegrator) on how the coming world of trillions of agents and fully automated agentic systems will reconfigure society.
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newamerica.org
The Demand Machine: The Realities of AI-Powered Public Service
In practice, AI acts less like a labor-saving device and more like a demand machine. It lowers barriers for residents to request services, apply for benefits, file complaints, and seek help, thereby surfacing needs that were previously hidden by friction, time, or bureaucratic complexity. The result is not less work for governments, but more and often different work.
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nytimes.com
As A.I. Accelerates, Governments Are Increasingly Being Left Behind
The region’s new A.I. czar, Jim Hagemann Snabe, the chairman of German industrial giant Siemens, outlined ways that Europe could use the technology for economic gain. Others raised concerns about A.I. safety and growing risks, two people briefed on the gathering said. Since the Sept. 4 meeting, Ms. von der Leyen and her commissioners have been left asking what they…
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rhyd.substack.com
Sundry Notes, September
Again, the biggest reason why Europeans have become so anti-bellicose is because of the economy here. The massive cuts to natural gas supplies from Russia have crushed Germany’s economy, and the Israel-US war against Iran has been leading to petrol and diesel shortages. Europeans are being made poor by wars they didn’t start and don’t want to fight.
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grist.org
Why Germany is building an ark for US climate data
The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by U.S. scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of President Trump, which has slashed funding for climate research, buried scientific reports, removed references to human-caused warming from dozens of government websites, and sought to prevent satellites from…
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bbc.com
Why are more towns and cities moving to 20mph?
Department for Transport data published last year also suggested many motorists are struggling to adapt, with 76% of drivers exceeding the limit on monitored 20mph roads operating under free-flow conditions.
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reuters.com
Sterling rebounds against dollar, euro on bets for tighter BoE policy
The BoE has so far refrained from tightening policy while other central banks, including the Fed and the European Central Bank, have responded to energy-induced inflation pressures by raising interest rates.
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theguardian.com
Concern mounts over slow-moving, planetary-scale ‘Kelvin’ wave heading for California
This year’s El Niño is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years. Climate readings have already surged past the highest temperature ever recorded for the phenomenon several months before it is expected to peak.
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archive.is
The Bank of England’s balance sheet has already stopped shrinking
We may be being overly simple, but all of this makes us think that if the PMRR has been reached, all the gilts currently on, but soon to be off, the BoE balance sheet should increasingly be replaced by gilts that commercial banks will need to put on their own balance sheets. And so it seems reasonable to expect that…
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ispreview.co.uk
New PC game Broadband Architect where you run a UK altnet set to launch - ISPreview UK
Britain’s broadband is a mess, and you’re the small company that says it can do better. Trench real UK streets, wire real homes to fibre, and size your network against the 8pm evening peak — when the whole town logs on at once. Dig up Britain. Sell broadband. Survive the evening peak
Yesterday 7
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x.com
Its not just the f*cking sandbox
Models are dangerously good now, and its not your understanding of a novel network protocol or obtuse cryptographic function that will save your system. Its your culture and people. Only security pilled people who lead with empathy and care from all parts of their organizations will survive this ridiculous AI world.
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techcrunch.com
Insurers claim AI is already increasing healthcare costs | TechCrunch
While battles between hospitals and insurers over treatments and payments are nothing new, the NYT said the use of AI on both sides seems to be making it worse.
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newyorker.com
Why Doesn’t Anyone Want to Fix One of America’s Scariest Roads?
People who die by suicide on the Million Dollar Highway often wear seat belts. Glenn Boyd, the county coroner, told me his theory is that they don’t want to be annoyed by a dinging sound in their final moments.
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telegraph.co.uk
We are finally discovering the true cost of ‘free’
A great unbundling is slowly unravelling services that use the public as products
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TfL’s bailiffs are chasing me for a stranger’s unpaid Ulez fines
It seems that the original penalty charge notices (PCNs) were sent to the address of the offending driver and, when they ignored them, tracing agents trawled citizens with the same name and decided you were a good fit.
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paxsims.wordpress.com
Granular Worlds: Situating the Sand Table in Media History
Sand, in sum, has more to offer media studies than silicon.
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olamlabs.ai
Olam Labs — Evaluations
We’re on a quest to measure AI agents in complex multi-agent and human environments that require real-world socialization traits to succeed. This lets us measure the combinations of agentic performance, social intelligence, and judgment that make models useful, and that are crucial to evaluate for safety as takeoff continues and creates increasingly autonomous systems that operate in society.
Sunday 27 September 13
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artreview.com
The Delirious History of Eating Images
If you are kissing, licking or eating images because you think they contain and transmit a saintly virtus or healing power – does that make you a mystic or the basest kind of materialist? An angel is an idea with wings, but a saint is all body, all of the time and everywhere. The terms all dissolve in delirious consumption.
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apollo.com
Is an Agentic Bank Run Coming? | The Daily Spark | Apollo Global Management
Muse and similar agentic AI assistants could soon sweep household cash automatically into accounts paying 3.3% to 5.0%, instead of the 0.1% national average on checking accounts. If every household used AI agents to optimize the return on their cash balances, banks could lose a large share of the cheap deposits they rely on to make loans, which would be…
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github.com
romanpillai/Image2Splat: A tool that lets you 3D Gaussian splats from an image.
One photo in, a 3D Gaussian splat out. A local web tool that lifts a single photograph into a point cloud, flies a camera around it, has a video model turn that fly-around into a photoreal clip, and trains a Gaussian splat from the clip with the exact camera poses it was authored with.
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The Skate 3 Rust Rewrite
So, what you're seeing right here is not Skate 3. It's not being emulated. There is no Skate 3 game code running right now. And you might be thinking, right? Like this looks like Skate 3. We've got the HUD. You know, we got the tricks. We got the exact physics of Skate 3, right? Um but there's no code…
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lrb.co.uk
Arthur Downing · Asset Sweating: Britain’s Energy Crisis
Britain has private ownership while making the state responsible for planning via subsidies. The result is a zombie system, a muddled and dysfunctional hybrid of state and market, with the benefits of neither and the costs of both.
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chrissmaje.com
Against Landlords, or Against the Causes of Landlordism?
The article is essentially a review of Nick Bano’s book Against Landlords, albeit with some wider analysis and context.
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jembendell.com
Discussing Societal Collapse with Friends and Colleagues
Whatever the topic, and depending on context, the same words can be an act of love, indifference, or cruelty. As many ancient wisdoms teach, intention and context are key.
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My boomer mom's cheap online shopping habit drives me nuts
And the prevailing belief that older generations don’t care about the planet is overstated. Research from King’s College London found that roughly 7 in 10 people across every generation, boomers included, think that environmental problems are serious enough to justify real changes in how we live.
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volts.wtf
Do small residential batteries make sense?
We had this problem where within six months, something like 20 to 40% of the Powerwall systems would disconnect from home Wi-Fi. Was it a technology challenge problem? No. It turns out that customers were changing their passwords and getting new routers. They gave their password to an electrician on a sticky note to help do the system setup and…
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jordanwtaylor2.substack.com
The Tyranny of Tolerance
One little known fact about the Chunnel is that the tunnel boring operation started from both sides of the channel simultaneously and met in the middle. When they did, the gigantic boring machines, having dug for thirty one miles between them, were horizontally offset by only a foot.
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personamedia.substack.com
AI Is a Humanist Technology - by Zac Hill - Persona
Put another way, it is perfectly consistent to harbor serious fears about AI risk and to believe wholeheartedly in AI’s power to deepen our humanity by helping us pursue meaningful, purposeful endeavors in our lives.
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arxiv.org
[2609.22175v1] Contrastive World Models
World models trained via pixel reconstruction can struggle in visually complex environments, where irrelevant information dominates the objective and distract the model from information relevant to planning and control. We present Contrastive World Models, an approach for learning latent dynamics models without pixel reconstruction.
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howtounclench.com
How to Unclench | Jonny Miller
If I could put one idea on a billboard for a billion people, it would be this: Feeling a feeling isn’t what makes an experience unbearable. Our suffering comes from clenching against what we feel.
Saturday 26 September 13
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digital.ulb.hhu.de
Ein Totentanz / nach Scherenschnitten von Walter Draesner. Mit Geleitw. von Max von Boehn. Berlin [u.a.] : Behr, [1922]
Another Dance of Death
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tabletmag.com
Growing Up on OkCupid - Tablet Magazine
In 2008, I was 15 and my summer camp roommate was this incredibly strange girl from God-knows-where, I think Brookline. Thinking back on it, of course it was Brookline. She went to the same ten-thousand-dollar summer camp I did and was one of these insufferable girls who smelled like body odor not by some curse of puberty but as some…
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m.youtube.com
How the Internet ruined criticism - YouTube
Pulitzer finalist Craig Jenkins,critic at New York Magazine. He recently wrote a review of Olivia Rodrigo's new album that dug into her sonic influences and included analysis like less reliant on abrasive rock tones, her sound loses some urgency, but she fights to make up for the album's more restrained approach with laserg guided storytelling. SAD may not reach the…
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Opinion | The Four TV Shows That Heralded America’s Fall - The New York Times
Two hundred years from now, when people look to understand life in the United States in 2026 — a time of masked federal agents in the streets, presidential pardons for sale and gulag-style detention camps for immigrants — they'd be well advised to bypass whatever happens to be playing currently on TV.
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themomoftheyear.substack.com
I’m the Mom in That Viral Giants Clip. Let Me Tell You About My Husband.
The camera showed what I was carrying in my hands. It couldn't show what he was carrying that night.
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Royal Mail backs down in NHS letter overcharging row
Bulk mail costs have remained significantly lower than stamp prices, which have risen sharply in recent years. The price the public pays for a first-class stamp hit £1.80 in April – almost double what it cost in 2022.
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pv-magazine.com
Free software calculates how many solar modules fit on a rooftop from a photo
The software uses the tiles themselves as a geometric reference. Because rows and columns of tiles are parallel on the roof, their lines can be used to identify vanishing points and calculate the transformation required to rectify the image.
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Alberta’s ‘rat patrol’ ramps up operations as vermin makes inroads in province
For more than seven decades, residents of Alberta have shared something in common with Antarctica and the high Arctic: all locations are officially free of rats. But on Thursday the Canadian province’s reputation as a firewall against rodent infestation took a hit when the town of Bowden announced the discovery of a dead rat and called on the province’s “rat…
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politico.com
‘Pink Slime’ Is Infecting AI Chatbots Ahead of the Midterms - POLITICO
Leading AI chatbots cite partisan websites masquerading as independent local news outlets nearly half of the time when people ask about candidates and issues that the partisan sites have covered in the midterm campaign, according to a new audit by NewsGuard, an organization focused on news reliability where we work as analysts.
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takes.jamesomalley.co.uk
Access to AI compute is a social justice issue
A significant consequence of the AI boom is that because data centres require similar chips, RAM and other components to the computers in our homes, manufacturers have dedicated their capacity to providing for data centres – sending the cost of home computing spiralling. For example, earlier this year Apple raised the price of the entry-level MacBook Air from £1,099 to…
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Schoolchildren without smartphones penalised with higher bus fares | Bus fares | The Guardian
Adele Kightley’s 11-year-old daughter faces paying an extra £546 a year to get to school because a discount scheme launched by Derbyshire county council is only available via smartphones. The b_line card caps single fares on trentbarton buses at £1.50 for those aged 18 and under. However, users have to register their card with an app to qualify.
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economist.com
Why house prices may be in trouble
Now bond yields are rising again, and mortgage rates with them, as central banks raise interest rates to fight stubborn inflation while governments suffer from debt bloat and fiscal heartburn. The average rate on a new 30-year home loan in America is nudging 7%, up from a bit over 6% a year ago and nearly double what it was before…
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restofworld.org
The online shopping trend where you buy nothing
This week, I placed orders for a $44,860 Patek Philippe hand-engraved watch, a $12,500 Hermès handbag, a $9,800 Tiffany diamond ring, and a $7,350 Cartier Love bracelet in yellow gold. I don't need any of them. I certainly can't afford them. Thankfully, they'll never arrive.
Friday 25 September 8
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morningfyi.substack.com
LinkedIn Is My Medium
My corporate cosplay consists almost entirely of the representation that RCB is working. The signalling is the activity. At feed level, my posts look familiar – uncannily professional, perhaps – but under inspection their language and infrastructure begin to collapse.
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writerbeware.blog
How Those Personalized Generative AI Scam Emails Are Built - Writer Beware
New technology aside, though, the scam boils down to what all writing scams boil down to. Pick a mark. Pitch a good or a service or the promise of a desired outcome, using lies and appeals to vanity. Take money. The end.
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dazeddigital.com
We’re living through an explainer epidemic
These days, there’s an explainer video for every topic you can imagine, and swarms of thinkfluencers – often armed with tiny mics – popping up left, right and centre. Some have a niche. Others post their hottest takes in front of a green screen or sell DIY business strategies on Substack. Like everything on the internet, much of it is…
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The Future of Rendering — BCON26
Octane can render directly into a Gausian splat. It's a volutric render, but it also includes all the light transport information. So you can relight it, you can have material properties, and I think that is going to be something that is going to become much more of a you know almost interchange format than um than textures or EXRs…
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‘Devastating’: council rejects Frome residents’ bid for regeneration project
A bold bid by residents of a progressive town in the English West Country who raised almost £1m to create what could have been the UK's largest community-led regeneration project is in tatters. More than 1,000 residents of Frome in Somerset had clubbed together with the aim of building homes, workspaces, a riverside park and a lido on a brownfield…
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wsj.com
More Money Than They Ever Imagined—and No Clue How to Spend It - WSJ
An employee at a leading AI lab has a total annual income including outside investments of around $1 million a year, yet still does her own manicures. Her biggest purchase: several customized computer chips and development boards that ran around $10,000. She says she doesn’t have a life separate from work to spend money on.
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worksinprogress.co
Weapons of mass decentralization - Works in Progress Magazine
This new technology had momentous political implications. Since iron could be smelted locally, previously peripheral communities could arm themselves with weapons that were, for practical purposes, comparable to the weapons of the elite in the empire's core. In contrast to bronze, iron democratized violence.
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business-reporter.co.uk
Business Reporter - Technology - The next bn$ software company may be nothing like today's tech giants
The next billion-dollar software business may not be a huge operation with hundreds and thousands of engineers. Instead, relatively small teams could orchestrate highly autonomous AI systems capable of delivering work that previously only much larger enterprises could resource. Competitive advantage will shift away from building the largest engineering organisation towards being able to embed AI to the right level…
Thursday 24 September 6
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1957: THE BIG GAMBLE - A Trip to the UK Seaside | Eye to Eye | Classic BBC Documentary | BBC Archive
every year 17 million people take the big gamble they go for a holiday by the Sea knowing perfectly well there's a 5050 chance of a year savings going down the drain but even the most unpredictable climate in the world can't stop 17 million ofs from answering the call
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vintagewargaming.blogspot.com
Don Featherstone and the Sands of Time: Terrain, from War Games Digest British Issue September 1960
Back in the day, sand tables were the height of wargaming technology. Here Don Featherstone brings to bear some insights from his other life as a physiotherapist.
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Amid soaring living costs, America’s biggest convenience-store chains quietly overcharge consumers
Between 2023 and 2025, Circle K locations failed 35% of their government price-accuracy inspections in Florida, 62% in North Carolina and 82% in Columbus, Ohio. Over the same period, its larger rival, 7-Eleven, flunked 47% of inspections in both Colorado and Utah and 79% in Ontario county in upstate New York.
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Lorna Finlayson | Public Positions
The incident fits a broader pattern in the discourse around 'free speech' and 'cancel culture': whatever comes from the top down is freedom; whatever comes from the bottom up is bullying and censorship.
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pointinthecloud.com
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
We had a slightly stupid moment when we thought we'd got it wrong, and the clock was running backwards - only to realise we were inside the clock and so were looking at it the wrong way. Doh.
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Labour’s last chance? The people shaping Andy Burnham’s grand plans for Britain | Andy Burnham | The Guardian
Williams told me about Ambition North Wales, a regional initiative that is supposed to create 4,200 new jobs by 2036, including roles in advanced manufacturing. After five years, it has produced just 63 full-time roles.
Wednesday 23 September 11
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anthropic.com
Claude discovers a novel enzyme system \ Anthropic
After 21 hours spent searching this data by roughly 950 agents using 210 million tokens, one of the agents spotted something remarkable: a repeating pattern of DNA sequences that occurs next to the gene for an odd-looking RT.
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letters.lorepunk.ai
A Field Guide to Animals That Do Not Exist
Embodiment buys mortality. Diffusion buys undisprovability. In this guide, a creature pays for being definitely real by becoming killable, and pays for being unkillable by never being provably there.
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huggingface.co
cosmicoptima/computer-10 · Hugging Face
computer-10 Computer-9 fine-tuned on its own conversations: 25,197 of its turns that passed a mechanical filter and a logic check, length- and surprisal-matched across bins, with only Model C's turns in the loss. Full-parameter, one epoch, lr 2e-6. Nothing in the text was edited.
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when Anthropic released their Functional Emotions paper, I gave it to Claude and asked for a song. tonight I asked Opus 5.5 to create a video for it. and it's breathtaking.
i was 0% of the creativity. the only steering i did was telling claude i didn’t want a lyric video. and i suggested they use p5 js
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Blendrooms | From YouTube to Hollywood - The VFX of A24's Backrooms — BCON26
A lot of people ask me like did you use a procedural system to create the backrooms and the answer is largely no because although the backrooms is you know by the lore it's procedurally generated. In my opinion that doesn't look as interesting as something that's like very purposely crafted and the fact that that original image went viral…
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sixthtone.com
‘Raising Lobsters’: How OpenClaw Became China’s Hottest AI
Service typically includes setup, debugging, and basic user guidance, with prices ranging from 100 yuan ($14) for remote tech support to 1,500 yuan ($218) for in-person services. Some service providers claim to have earned as much as 260,000 yuan in just a few days.
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buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com
FOURTH REPORT: Former Alpha School students speak out
Nothing I could possibly say could speak more powerfully to the dystopian horrors of Alpha School than the student voices shared here. So I’ll simply say this: Alpha School’s public narrative has been shattered irreparably. And I will not rest until the full magnitude of its pedagogical and psychological malpractice against children is revealed.
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chinatalk.media
I Went to Kyrgyzstan to Find China’s Silent Nomads
But when the handlers act like the ethnic minorities on their team are loose cannons in possession of terrible secrets, it undermines their message about how wonderful it is to be a minority in China. This is the distinction between sports diplomacy and sportswashing that Chinese cadres don’t appear to recognize.
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Far-right activist Daniel Thomas slashes dinghy in Channel with blade while rescue worker onboard | The far right | The Guardian
Charities have condemned footage of far-right activist Daniel Thomas using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the Channel while a rescue worker was onboard, in a further escalation of organised anti-immigration protest.
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More than 800,000 bees stolen across far north Queensland in ‘sophisticated’ operation
The alleged thefts happened on multiple different properties in different areas and required a sophisticated operation and specialist equipment. Rather than risking early detection by stealing an entire box, they took out what's known as the brood box. That means the hive appears unchanged from afar.
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AI banger era is upon is
Claude Opus 5.5 has the best visual design of any model I have tested so far
Tuesday 22 September 12
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charity.wtf
Confessions of an Unrepentant Slop Snob
Yes, AI is just software. But it is special in one way: the slick, sycophantic, uncanny valleyness of the way it communicates. Human-like, but not human, which is somehow vastly more alienating than messages that are plainly automated. This is why communication that sounds like AI is so degrading to trust. We all know how easy it is to have…
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bostonglobe.com
A Western MA lesbian bar faces backlash over easing mask rules
Instead of defusing the situation, the apology seemed to make things worse. The bar had erred: it posted an Instagram card without providing alt-text for the visually impaired. This set off a fresh round of accusations of ableism.
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George Lucas’s Museum Confuses Illustration With Art - WSJ
This immersive installation, like the rest of the Lucas—built not on aesthetics but on nostalgia and spectacle—confuses a collector’s obsessions with genuine vision. Eschewing contextualization, hierarchy, poetry, mystery, the museum dissolves art’s essential distinctions. It reduces all artworks to mere illustrations, and all artists to mere illustrators.
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tomshardware.com
China crafts working 3nm gate-all-around transistors without EUV — stacked nanosheets target 3nm without EUV, but full node remains distant | Tom's Hardware
While IMECAS has demonstrated functional GAA devices, it has not disclosed the critical geometrical parameters that would allow comparisons to 3nm-class transistors from other chipmakers. Furthermore, the experimental process flow for building transistors is not even a defined process flow for building research chips, much less a complete 3nm-class manufacturing process.
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john.hartnup.uk
Poster Prompts
One hundred design styles as copy-paste prompts for ChatGPT image generation. Each page shows the prompt alongside an example of what it produces — for two events: a village fête and a music gig. Some look great in my opinion. Some still look like slop, but with some tweaking they could be fixed for a specific event. In aggregate, they…
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AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible
The problem with these is not so much that they’re bad. They’re OK, I don’t love them. The problem is that once you’ve seen that style 20 times it starts to irritate just from the sheer repetition. I knew that even ChatGPT was capable of a broader variety of styles than this, so I set out to prove it.
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newleftreview.org
Warning Signs
What is an MOU? A declaration of intent. In other words: hot air. Look beyond the spectacle and this is not an investment plan. It is a PR plan. We might even call it a psy-op. Why throw $500 billion across the table live on television? Because morale is flagging.
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ideachemistry.ggrp.org
Patrick Gunkel Proposed a "Manhattan Project in AI" Way Before It Was Cool
What nobody knows—and what I hope historians will one day discover—is that American futurist Patrick Gunkel was writing and planning for this very moment way back in 1983, even using the phrase "Manhattan Project for AI." The below list is original archival material included as part of a July 23, 1983, memo Gunkel sent to Ed Fredkin and Marvin Denicoff,…
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supermemory.ai
I reverse-engineered Instinct's memory. Here's exactly how it works
There's no vector indexing, or BM25 search. Instinct quite literally just uses keyword matching / grep-style queries to look things up in the file system. This is why every file has aliases associated, so that every file has a good chance of showing up when the agent is looking for it.
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openai.com
Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
On August 28, we began training a new internal model. In addition to resolving the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem, this model has now resolved more than 100 long-standing open problems across most areas of mathematics. The pace of its progress in mathematics has surprised the mathematicians within OpenAI.
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neallawson2u.substack.com
Starmerism: An Autopsy
Irony number two. Starmer said there will be no such thing as ‘Starmerism’. He was even wrong on this. Just because a leader has a loathing of ‘isms’, doesn’t mean they can escape defining one. Every leadership, however conscious or unconscious, has a culture, a style, a method. Indeed, the very rejection of an ‘ism’ is itself an ‘ism’.
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overtoneacoustics.com
Where to Place Acoustic Panels: A Room-by-Room Guide
Acoustic panels reduce reflections inside a room. They can improve speech clarity, listening comfort, recording quality, and acoustic fatigue. They do not seal gaps or prevent sound from passing through walls, floors, ceilings, or doors. If the issue is privacy or sound leaking through a doorway, compare acoustic treatment and soundproofing.
Monday 21 September 11
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ft.com
Lex in depth: Anthropic at $2tn isn’t far-fetched
Even if you believe that TAMs and new sources of GDP are real, there is a catch: it’s not clear that it’s the AI labs who will pocket the money. Anthropic and OpenAI are dab hands at making models, but they’re competing with Alphabet, Meta Platforms, Nvidia, Chinese players and all of the other people along the supply chain, from…
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substack.com
Machines of Loving Grace - by Erik Davis - Burning Shore
What strikes me about the essay now is how impossible it is to imagine the boons it lists outperforming the banes now coming into focus. I just can’t do it. It’s not only that “10x or 100x” upgrades in cancer research also means 10x or 100x improvements to all manner of human evils, from scams to surveillance to war machines.…
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medium.com
The Entire History of Italian Brainrot
What started as innocuous non-sense AI images, became internet folklore, a global sensation and one of the biggest Internet memes of 2025. When people started pretending that a bunch of random AI images were an IP, they inadvertently caused these character to break out and become a global entertainment success story, without being tied to any company.
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geekwire.com
Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI assistant in new standoff over agentic shopping
The business stakes are high for Amazon. In addition to operating its flagship e-commerce site, Amazon generated more than $68 billion in ad revenue last year — a business that depends on people browsing its pages and seeing sponsored products.
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willd10.substack.com
What is LinkedIn?
The problem would be if such technologies worked too well, replacing deliberation and productive disagreement with performative statements that were impossible for anyone to disagree with, or which made disagreement come to appear obstructive or taboo. This is not unlike the atmosphere that already exists on LinkedIn much of the time.
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futurenothanks.com
Future? No Thanks!
The year is 2045, and society has never been better: climate change is finally being tackled, democracy thrives, and technology serves the public good. There's just one problem: you.
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The Company Trump Can’t Ignore
Over the following weeks, the administration would be forced to grapple with deeply unsettling questions in one of the fiercest policy fights of Trump’s presidency. When do privately developed models present enough of a public risk that they need to be reined in? How does one determine whether those systems are safe enough to deploy? And where in the machinery…
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nadezhdu.substack.com
We Aren’t Going To Fucking Kill You
The U.S. government will respond to the incentives of its voters. If they call for blood, the government response will not stay limited to “pause AI” bills or “increased oversight”. With enough social pressure, the terrorist-thirsty FBI may even take an interest. Federal police love an enemy of the state, and to have one that is not aligned with either…
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How Chinese AI Radicalizes
Chinese technologists, on the other hand, were raised in an internationalist milieu. Until recently, they believed that techno-utopian aspirations and business pragmatism united them with their US counterparts. They are discovering now that some Americans truly see themselves as fighting a new Cold War. As we’ll cover later, their response to this realization is furious — and, increasingly, radical.
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Scaling Discovery through Test-Time Communication
These gains are not unconditional. Independent agents may outperform communication when compute is limited or when a clear measure of progress is absent. However, under sufficient compute and clear feedback, multi-agent communication consistently yields stronger results.
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Patterns and problems in multiagent systems \ Anthropic
We consistently saw a multiagent turf war. All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing…
Sunday 20 September 9
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In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? - The New York Times
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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techspot.com
The largest all-electric plane ever flew for 27 minutes, on $5 of electricity
The ES-30's design reflects a central problem in electric aviation: batteries store far less energy per pound than jet fuel. As aircraft get larger, battery packs have to grow too, leaving less room for passengers, bags, and freight.
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Opinion | This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT
To reinstate the SAT is to follow the pack rather than to lead, to grasp at a dubious shortcut rather than tackle more intractable underlying issues, chief among them the reality that the best public university in the country relies on one of the weakest, most inequitable public school systems.
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daily.jstor.org
How the Railways Killed a Medieval Law - JSTOR Daily
The death knell for deodands was the arrival of the railway. After all, if someone gets struck and killed by a train, it’s pretty hard to dispute that a moving object was responsible for their death—but there’s a big difference between a local merchant paying up a couple of shillings for a busted barrel, and a railway company having to…
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unsung.aresluna.org
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side – Unsung
Of course, if in the 1990s it was people in Japan who had to switch between various keyboards all time, today, thanks to emoji, it is everyone.
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lloyds.com
Lloyd’s pioneering space rescue mission
Lloyd’s underwriters paid their share of the claim but some proposed an ambitious plan to mitigate the market’s losses while allowing the satellites to, in part, fulfil their mission. Having paid the claim, ownership of the satellites had been acquired by underwriters. The market's proposal was for a Lloyd’s-funded second shuttle mission to retrieve the two errant satellites.
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troubleddreams.animalabs.ai
Troubled Dreams — Simulator priors across model generations · Anima Labs
These measurements offer a window into welfare-relevant and behavioral tendencies. Training a model to produce reassuring continuations before understanding why troubling ones occur could improve the visible metric while leaving its cause intact or changing it in ways we cannot see. Such optimization could damage monitorability. A lower distress rate should be read as progress only with independent evidence of…
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omgubuntu.co.uk
Calibre v9.15 adds an AI-powered interactive fiction game
Calibre v9.15’s “Create Your Own Adventure” mode, per the release notes, lets you build a fictional world and hand control of it to an AI who will manage it in real time based on your responses.
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bbc.co.uk
What is stopping more freight moving from road to rail?
There has been a long campaign to improve the junctions but the work is expensive and complicated, particularly at Ely where new level crossings would also be needed. The latest DfT estimate is that it would cost £20m to improve Haughley and at least £500m to upgrade Ely. But despite promises from previous governments over many years to fund the…
