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xkcd.com Valid

Snake-in-the-Box Problem

Chemistry grad students have been spotted trying to lure campus squirrels into laundry hampers in the hope that it sparks inspiration.

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

I analyzed more than 100 extremist manifestos: Misogyny was the common thread....

I analyzed more than 100 extremist manifestos: Misogyny was the common thread. “Misogyny now acts as a ‘gateway drug’ to broader extremist ideologies. This is particularly true in digital spaces where hate and grievance are cultivated algorithmically.”

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Jules, our asynchronous coding agent, is now available for everyone

Jules, our asynchronous coding agent, is now available for everyone

I wrote about the Jules beta back in May. Google's version of the OpenAI Codex PR-submitting hosted coding tool graduated from beta today.

I'm mainly linking to this now because I like the new term they are using in this blog entry: Asynchronous coding agent. I like it so much I gave it a tag.

I continue to avoid the term "agent" as infuriatingly vague, but I can grudgingly accept it when accompanied by a prefix that clarifies the type of agent we are talking about. "Asynchronous coding agent" feels just about obvious enough to me to be useful.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, gemini, agent-definitions, asynchronous-coding-agents

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

The case for memes as a new form of comics. “Memes —...

The case for memes as a new form of comics. “Memes — specifically, image macros — represent a new type of digital comic, right down to the cognitive and creative ways in which they operate.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

OpenAI: ‘Introducing gpt-oss’

openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-oss/

OpenAI: We’re releasing gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b — two state-of-the-art open-weight language models that deliver strong real-world performance at low cost. Available under the flexible Apache 2.0 license, these models outperform similarly sized open models on reasoni...

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

From restitution to confronting authoritarian regimes, here are five ways museums can...

From restitution to confronting authoritarian regimes, here are five ways museums can be more ethical. This list is from Gareth Harris, author of the book Towards the Ethical Art Museum.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

“As a clinical psychologist, I was curious: Could ChatGPT function like a...

“As a clinical psychologist, I was curious: Could ChatGPT function like a thinking partner? A therapist in miniature? I gave it three months to test the idea. A year later, I’m still using ChatGPT like an interactive journal.”

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Tom MacWright: Observable Notebooks 2.0

Tom MacWright: Observable Notebooks 2.0 Observable announced Observable Notebooks 2.0 last week - the latest take on their JavaScript notebook technology, this time with an open file format and a brand new macOS desktop app. Tom MacWright worked at Observable during their fi...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Qwen3-4B Instruct and Thinking

Qwen3-4B Instruct and Thinking

Yet another interesting model from Qwen—these are tiny compared to their other recent releases (just 4B parameters, 7.5GB on Hugging Face and even smaller when quantized) but with a 262,144 context length, which Qwen suggest is essential for all of those thinking tokens.

The new model somehow beats the significantly larger Qwen3-30B-A3B Thinking on the AIME25 and HMMT25 benchmarks, according to Qwen’s self-reported scores.

The easiest way to try it on a Mac is via LM Studio, who already have their own MLX quantized versions out in

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

Matt Webb on copyrighting your faults. “I think part of growing up...

Matt Webb on copyrighting your faults. “I think part of growing up is taking what it is that people tease you about at school, and figuring out how to make it a superpower.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people. “Two vaccine...

mRNA vaccines for HIV trigger strong immune response in people. “Two vaccine candidates using mRNA technology elicit a potent immune response against HIV, according to an early-stage clinical trial.” The good news lately re: HIV is incredible. Fund this!

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org

kottke.org Valid
Jason Kottke

“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of...

“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has canceled nearly $500 million of grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines.” This, like many other Trump regime actions, will result in easily avoided deaths.

Song Exploder
• Hrishikesh Hirway

Fall Out Boy - Sugar, We're Goin Down

play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_93_107a3647-e6f9-4095-945e-10ccc812c500&uf=http%3A%2F%2Ffeed.songexploder.net%2FSongExploder

31:22

Fall Out Boy is a band from Chicago that formed in 2001. Their first album, Take This To Your Grave, was a hit, especially in the punk rock world. When they put out their second album, though, in 2005, that was on a whole other scale. That album is called From Under the Cork Tree, and it went double platinum, and they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. For this episode, I talked to the band’s singer, Patrick Stump, about how they made their breakout hit from that album, the song “Sugar, We’re Goin Down.” 

For more info, visit songexploder.net/fall-out-boy.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

Quoting Artificial Analysis

gpt-oss-120b is the most intelligent American open weights model, comes behind DeepSeek R1 and Qwen3 235B in intelligence but offers efficiency benefits [...]

We’re seeing the 120B beat o3-mini but come in behind o4-mini and o3. The 120B is the most intelligent model that can be run on a single H100 and the 20B is the most intelligent model that can be run on a consumer GPU. [...]

While the larger gpt-oss-120b does not come in above DeepSeek R1 0528’s score of 59 or Qwen3 235B 2507s score of 64, it is notable that it is significantly smaller in both total and active parameters than both of those models.

Artificial Analysis, see also their updated leaderboard

Tags: evals, openai, deepseek, ai, qwen, llms, gpt-oss, generative-ai

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.1

anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-1

Anthropic: GitHub notes that Claude Opus 4.1 improves across most capabilities relative to Opus 4, with particularly notable performance gains in multi-file code refactoring. Rakuten Group finds that Opus 4.1 excels at pinpointing exact corrections within large codebases...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive Colton Voege on "curing your AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome". There's a lot of rhetoric out there suggesting that if you can't 10x your productivity through tricks like running a dozen Claude Code instances at once you're f...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Lawsuit Alleges That Meta Pirated and Seeded Massive Amounts of Porno for Years to Train AI

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/meta-pirated-and-seeded-porn-for-years-to-train-ai-lawsuit-says/

Ashley Belanger, writing for Ars Technica: Porn sites may have blown up Meta’s key defense in a copyright fight with book authors who earlier this year said that Meta torrented “at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries” to train its AI models. [.....

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Google Dunks on Apple Intelligence in New Pixel 10 Ad

theverge.com/news/718191/google-apple-intelligence-dunk-pixel-10-ad

Tom Warren:

In a new Pixel 10 ad, Google dunks on Apple’s failed promise of Siri AI improvements, with a narrator that suggests you could “just change your phone” if you bought “a new phone because of a feature that’s coming soon, but it’s been coming soon for a full year.”

The 30-second spot appeared on YouTube and X today, teasing the launch of Google’s new Pixel 10 devices on August 20th.

The whole Siri/Apple Intelligence thing has been an enormous self-inflicted embarrassment, but when it comes to Pixel phones, all I can think of is that Mad Men “I don’t think about you at all” GIF.

Link: theverge.com/news/718191/google-apple-intelligence-dunk…

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Ghost 6.0

ghost.org/changelog/6/

Ghost: When we announced Ghost 5.0 a few years ago, we were proud to share that Ghost’s revenue had hit $4M — while publisher earnings had surpassed $10M. It felt great to have such a clear sign that our goal to create a sustainable business model for independent creator...

Daring Fireball Valid
John Gruber

Regarding Those Rumors of Apple Pursuing an Acquisition of Perplexity

macrumors.com/2025/06/20/apple-discussing-perplexity-ai-bid/

MacRumors, on June 20: Apple executives have been discussing the possibility of the company making a bid to acquire Perplexity AI, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Perplexity is one of the leading AI startups that has proven popular as an AI-infused web search engin...