FeedCity

TimeScope: How Long Can Your Video Large Multimodal Model Go? New open source benchmark for evaluating vision LLMs on how well they handle long videos: TimeScope probes the limits of long-video capabilities by inserting several short (~5-10 second) video clips---our "needle...

Announcing Toad - a universal UI for agentic coding in the terminal Will McGugan is building his own take on a terminal coding assistant, in the style of Claude Code and Gemini CLI, using his Textual Python library as the display layer. Will makes some confident claims about...

1KB JS Numbers Station

Terence Eden built a neat and weird 1023 byte JavaScript demo that simulates a numbers station using the browser SpeechSynthesisUtterance, which I hadn't realized is supported by every modern browser now.

This inspired me to vibe code up this playground interface for that API using Claude:

Tags: javascript, text-to-speech, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, terence-eden, vibe-coding

Author Kate Broad writes about the role of indie bookstores in a time when public libraries are under attack. “This fight for free speech isn’t new, and independent bookstores have been fighting it for a long time.”

like, one day you discover you can talk to dogs. it's fun and interesting so you do it more, learning the intricacies of their language and their deepest customs. you learn other people are surprised by what you can do. you have never quite fit in, but you learn people appreciate your ability and want you around to help them. the dogs appreciate you too, the only biped who really gets it. you assemble for yourself a kind of belonging. then one day you wake up and the universal dog translator is for sale at walmart for $4.99

— Dave White, a mathematician, on the OpenAI IMO gold medal

Tags: careers, ai

Gigi Perez is a singer and songwriter from Florida, and at 25 years old, she’s already had so many ups and downs in her music career. She started sharing her songs on TikTok, where they got enough attention that she got signed to a major label deal, but that ultimately didn’...

I Watched It Happen in Hungary. Now It’s Happening Here. “I came to understand that the real danger of a strongman isn’t his tactics; it’s how others, especially those with power, justify their acquiescence.”

Submitting a paper with a "hidden" prompt is scientific misconduct if that prompt is intended to obtain a favorable review from an LLM. The inclusion of such a prompt is an attempt to subvert the peer-review process. Although ICML 2025 reviewers are forbidden from using LLMs to produce their reviews of paper submissions, this fact does not excuse the attempted subversion. (For an analogous example, consider that an author who tries to bribe a reviewer for a favorable review is engaging in misconduct even though the reviewer is not supposed to accept bribes.) Note that this use of hidden prompts is distinct from those intended to detect if LLMs are being used by reviewers; the latter is an acceptable use of hidden prompts.

— ICML 2025, Statement about subversive hidden LLM prompts

Tags: ai-ethics, prompt-injection, generative-ai, ai, llms

“We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!”

Health Insurers Are Hiking Premiums as Their Profits Balloon. “The US’s six largest health insurers reported massive profits last year, doling out billions on stock buybacks and dividends.”

Qwen3-Coder: Agentic Coding in the World It turns out that as I was typing up my notes on Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 the Qwen team were unleashing something much bigger: Today, we’re announcing Qwen3-Coder, our most agentic code model to date. Qwen3-Coder is available in...

Qwen/Qwen3-235B-A22B-Instruct-2507 Significant new model release from Qwen, published yesterday without much fanfare. This is a follow-up to their April release of the full Qwen 3 model family, which included a Qwen3-235B-A22B model which could handle both reasoning and non-...

Ozzy Osborne died today at the age of 76. His farewell concert a few weeks ago was the highest-grossing charity concert of all time, raising more than $200 million.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data This new alignment paper from Anthropic wins my prize for best illustrative figure so far this year: The researchers found that fine-tuning a model on data generated by another model ...

Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI Mistral have released environmental impact numbers for their largest model, Mistral Large 2, in more detail than I have seen from any of the other large AI labs. The methodology sounds robust: [...] we have initiate...

Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is now stable and generally available The last remaining member of the Gemini 2.5 trio joins Pro and Flash in General Availability today. Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite is the cheapest of the 2.5 family, at $0.10/million input tokens and $0.40/million output tok...

Follow Architectural Digest as they head behind the scenes at the offices of NPR Music to see how the now-iconic Tiny Desk Concerts come together. My favorite bits are the callouts of all the stuff on the shelves behind the artists: Adele’s water bottle, Sabrina Carpenter’s bedazzled martini glass, a Green Bay Packers helmet signed by Harry Styles. And: “Chappell Roan’s wig is actually sitting on Cypress Hill’s skull.”

Tags: Architectural Digest · music · NPR · Tiny Desk Concerts · video

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Pre-Show: Casey did Marco’s favorite thing CalDigit TS5+ (affiliate link) CalDigit TS5+ (product page) iperf3 Follow-up: F1 (the sport, not the movie) Apple expected to win 🇺🇸 rights F1 TV Vroom John’s video != Casey’s immersive ride-along To s...

Teaser trailer for Pixar’s next film, Hoppers. “We put this 🧠 into this 🦫.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

I stumbled across this July 2019 article by Arthur C. Brooks about professional decline and it gave me lots to think about: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. One of the takeaways is that different stages of your life require different approa...