FeedCity: Featured

Quoting Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen and Manas Joglekar

When we optimize responses using a reward model as a proxy for “goodness” in reinforcement learning, models sometimes learn to “hack” this proxy and output an answer that only “looks good” to it (because coming up with an answer that is actually good can be hard). The philos...

Daring Fireball
15 Jan 00:09 • John Gruber

The Explosive, Immediate, Early Growth of the iPhone

mattrichman.net/takeaways-from-apples-q4-2011/

Matt Richman, back in 2012: In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, a...

Daring Fireball
14 Jan 23:27 • John Gruber

Meta Shutters Three VR Studios

engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-has-closed-three-vr-studios-as-part-of-its-metaverse-cuts-202720670.html

Karissa Bell, Engadget: Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated wit...

kottke.org
14 Jan 23:06 • Jason Kottke

Divers

“Divers documents the restless anticipation of walking to the platform’s edge and the fleeting serenity found in jumping.” Lovely. Just lovely. (via colossal)

Tags: diving · slow motion · sports · video

Simon Willison's Weblog
14 Jan 22:42

Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files

Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files

Claude Cowork defaults to allowing outbound HTTP traffic to only a specific list of domains, to help protect the user against prompt injection attacks that exfiltrate their data.

Prompt Armor found a creative workaround: Anthropic's API domain is on that list, so they constructed an attack that includes an attacker's own Anthropic API key and has the agent upload any files it can see to the https://api.anthropic.com/v1/files endpoint, allowing the attacker to retrieve their content later.

Via Hacker News

Tags: security, ai, prompt-injection, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, exfiltration-attacks, ai-agents, claude-code, lethal-trifecta

Daring Fireball
14 Jan 22:03 • John Gruber

Google Launches Beta of ‘Personal Intelligence’, Connecting Gemini to Google Apps

blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/personal-intelligence/

Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog: The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. La...

kottke.org
14 Jan 21:51 • Jason Kottke

Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White...

Claudette Colvin, Who Refused to Give Her Bus Seat to a White Woman, Dies at 86. “History had me glued to the seat.” Her refusal predates Rosa Parks’ similar stand, but she was deemed “too dark-skinned and too poor” to be a civil rights symbol.

kottke.org
14 Jan 20:45 • Jason Kottke

Olive Oil Sculptures

Suzanne Saroff makes unusual photographic sculptures, including these dynamic olive oil shapes. Tags: art · food · photography · Suzanne Saroff

Daring Fireball
14 Jan 20:45 • John Gruber

Verizon’s Cell Network Is Down, and AT&T and T-Mobile Are Sassing Them About It

techradar.com/news/live/verizon-outage-january-2026

Jacob Krol, reporting for Techradar: While Verizon had a good few months, with the last major outage occurring in October 2024, it seems that the popular United States wireless carrier is having some issues. So, if you’re on Verizon and seeing ‘SOS’ in place of network b...

Daring Fireball
14 Jan 20:45 • John Gruber

Bill and Hillary Clinton’s Personal Letter to Rep. James Comer

nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/13/us/clinton-letter.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EVA.dZDj.K8eGYUUHnOXO&smid=url-share

The letter speaks for itself, and is very much worth reading in full. I’ll quote only from the conclusion, which rhetorically feels very Bill: Continue to mislead Americans about what is truly at stake, and you will learn that Americans are better at finding the truth th...

kottke.org
14 Jan 20:15 • Jason Kottke

I Was Kidnapped by Idiots. “Later, he tried the ‘good cop, bad...

I Was Kidnapped by Idiots. “Later, he tried the ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine on me but undermined the effect by playing both characters himself, on alternate days, which just made him seem deranged.”

xkcd.com
14 Jan 20:09

16 Part Epoxy

Some surfaces may seem difficult to glue. But if you research the materials, find tables of what adhesives work on them, and prepare your surfaces carefully, you can fail to glue them in a fun NEW way that fills your house with dangerous vapors.

Song Exploder
14 Jan 19:08 • Hrishikesh Hirway

Hit-Boy and Nipsey Hussle - Racks In the Middle (feat. Roddy Ricch and Hit-Boy)

play.prx.org/listen?ge=prx_93_76e93efc-6c81-4a85-b1bf-dbd599e21869&uf=http%3A%2F%2Ffeed.songexploder.net%2FSongExploder

22:14

Hit-Boy is an award-winning producer and rapper from LA. He’s one of my all-time favorite producers, from “Backseat Freestyle” by Kendrick Lamar, to “Sicko Mode” by Travis Scott, to tracks he’s made for Beyonce, Nas, and the Jay-Z & Kanye album Watch the Throne. So I was...

kottke.org
14 Jan 19:06 • Jason Kottke

Jamelle Bouie: “The American public, then, is left not with a president...

Jamelle Bouie: “The American public, then, is left not with a president but with a man who imagines himself master and behaves like a tyrant. A man whose agents brutalize ordinary citizens and then defame them in the wake of their deaths…”

kottke.org
14 Jan 18:30 • Jason Kottke

Stop complaining about paywalls existing. “These paywalls are attempts to make this...

Stop complaining about paywalls existing. “These paywalls are attempts to make this dying field viable. When you get personally offended by paywalls, you’re essentially saying we should work for free.”

kottke.org
14 Jan 17:42 • Jason Kottke

Donald Trump Is Waging War Against Human Conscience. “The lust for mud...

Donald Trump Is Waging War Against Human Conscience. “The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late — neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.”

kottke.org
14 Jan 17:03 • Jason Kottke

Zoe Saldaña is now the highest-grossing actor of all time (bc of...

Zoe Saldaña is now the highest-grossing actor of all time (bc of Avatar & Marvel). 2. Scarlett Johansson, 3. Samuel L. Jackson, 4. Robert Downey Jr., 5. Chris Pratt. Would be interested to see inflation adjusted rankings…

Daring Fireball
14 Jan 16:42 • John Gruber

Meta, a Completely Trustworthy Company, Leaks That Demand for Ray-Ban Meta Glasses Is Surging

bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-13/meta-said-to-discuss-doubling-ray-ban-glasses-output-after-surge-in-demand

Daniele Lepido and Antonio Vanuzzo, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas): Meta Platforms Inc. and EssilorLuxottica SA are discussing potentially doubling production capacity for AI-powered smart glasses by the end of this year, in a bid to capture growing demand and...

kottke.org
14 Jan 16:21 • Jason Kottke

Currently listening to this Thai house mix from Meltmode, played from a...

Currently listening to this Thai house mix from Meltmode, played from a tuktuk tooling around the streets of Bangkok.

kottke.org
14 Jan 15:51 • Jason Kottke

Lunchtime

In the late 70s and early 80s, photographer Charles H. Traub roamed the streets of Chicago, New York, and Europe to take photos of people during the lunch hour. Colorful and direct, animated and intimate, the portraits are shot close to the subjects, composed seemingly off-the-cuff, focusing on just their heads and shoulders. Each subject reveals something of himself or herself to the camera: the woman who takes the opportunity to pose in dignified profile or the one who purses her lips in an exaggerated pout, even the somewhat less-fortunate subjects caught adjusting their glasses or blinking. Tags: Charles H. Traub · photography