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The Fear of Never Landing is a new album from ambient music band Marconi Union, whose 2011 song Weightless has been described as “the world’s most relaxing song”. Get it on YT, Bandcamp, Spotify, and Apple Music.

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How OpenElections Uses LLMs The OpenElections project collects detailed election data for the USA, all the way down to the precinct level. This is a surprisingly hard problem: while county and state-level results are widely available, precinct-level results are published in ...

The GENIUS Act passes the Senate after explicit threats to Democrats from the crypto lobby, and shady crypto billionaire Justin Sun cozies up even closer to the Trump family

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the band, Talking Heads have released a new music video for their iconic 1997 single, Psycho Killer. The video stars Saoirse Ronan and was directed by Mike Mills.

Tags: music · Saoirse Ronan · Talking Heads · video

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They are doing a Spaceballs 2. (“They” includes Mel Brooks and Rick Moranis, who has not appeared in a live-action film since 1997.) “I am one with the Schwartz and the Schwartz is with me.”

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Peter Kafka: So in March, when Gruber announced that Something is Rotten in the State of Cupertino — focusing on Apple’s botched plans to imbue its ailing Siri service with state-of-the-art AI — lots of people paid attention. Including, apparently, folks at the very top ...

You know the problem when you accidentally or naively committed on the main Git branch, but then you’re too far coding something that turns out to need more and more (unexpected) work, and you find yourself not able to deploy to production? Yep, happened to me today (again).

Nicolas Lellouche, writing for the French-language site Numerama (block quote below is from Safari’s English translation) (via Joe Rossignol at MacRumors): What is the problem with Europe? Apple does not explain it very clearly, but suggests that the European Union’s req...

A new study from MIT’s Media Lab (not yet peer-reviewed & small sample size): ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills.

John Voorhees, writing at MacStories, regarding a new command-line transcription tool cleverly named Yap written by his son Finn last week during WWDC: On the way, Finn filled me in on a new class in Apple’s Speech framework called SpeechAnalyzer and its SpeechTranscribe...

Bungie: Through every comment and real-time conversation on social media and Discord, your voice has been strong and clear. We’ve taken this to heart, and we know we need more time to craft Marathon into the game that truly reflects your passion. After much discussion wi...

The [NYC] Subway Is Not Scary. “It’s fine and safe. It’s full of women and children. There are tons of old ladies on there.” And: “You sound real corny being scared of the subway.”

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Historian Heather Cox Richardson is now doing visual versions of her daily newsletter on YouTube. Yesterday’s video explains the origins and significance of Juneteenth. Black people in Galveston met the news Order No. 3 brought with celebrations in the streets, but emanc...

I continue to have fun running fantasy cooking prompts through LLMs - this time I tried "Give me a wildly ambitious recipe for zucchini cooked three ways" followed by "Go more ambitious" and now I need to get myself a centrifuge to help spherify my clarified zucchini consommé.

Tags: llms, cooking, ai, generative-ai

Just dropped yesterday: Lane 8’s Summer 2025 Mixtape. Got this on right now trying to coax the ol’ brainpan back into work mode.

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Radiology has embraced AI enthusiastically, and the labor force is growing nevertheless. The augmentation-not-automation effect of AI is despite the fact that AFAICT there is no identified "task" at which human radiologists beat AI. So maybe the "jobs are bundles of tasks" model in labor economics is incomplete. [...]

Can you break up your own job into a set of well-defined tasks such that if each of them is automated, your job as a whole can be automated? I suspect most people will say no. But when we think about other people's jobs that we don't understand as well as our own, the task model seems plausible because we don't appreciate all the nuances.

— Arvind Narayanan

Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, arvind-narayanan

This is episode four of Swimming with Shadows: A Radiolab Week of Sharks. Alison Kock was working at a car wash in Cape Town when she made a discovery that completely changed the course of her life. Inside a customer’s trunk, she found photographs of white sharks flying so h...

Ok, having been all over the western Mediterranean for the past two weeks, I’m back. *sigh* Here, without comment or context (I know, I know), are some of the things I saw: Not pictured: a bunch of amazing food we ate over the course of the trip. Tags: Jason Kottke · photography · Rome · travel 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Apple executives were a little light on substantial interviews last week, but a good one dropped today — Craig Federighi talking to Federico Viticci on the vast Mac-style windowing overhaul in iPadOS 26: “We don’t want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork”, Federig...

They poison their own context. Maybe you can call it context rot, where as context grows and especially if it grows with lots of distractions and dead ends, the output quality falls off rapidly. Even with good context the rot will start to become apparent around 100k tokens (with Gemini 2.5).

They really need to figure out a way to delete or "forget" prior context, so the user or even the model can go back and prune poisonous tokens.

Right now I work around it by regularly making summaries of instances, and then spinning up a new instance with fresh context and feed in the summary of the previous instance.

— Workaccount2 on Hacker News, coining "context rot"

Tags: long-context, llms, ai, generative-ai