FeedCity

Sean Hollister, writing for The Verge: But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It’s right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google. On March 3rd, he not only signed away Epic’s rights to sue and disparage the company over anything covered in the ...

Anthropic and the Pentagon

This piece by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders is the most thoughtful and grounded coverage I've seen of the recent and ongoing Pentagon/OpenAI/Anthropic contract situation.

AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance, and there is little to differentiate one from the other. The latest models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, in particular, tend to leapfrog each other with minor hops forward in quality every few months. [...]

In this sort of market, branding matters a lot. Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amodei, are positioning themselves as the moral and trustworthy AI provider. That has market value for both consumers and enterprise clients.

Tags: bruce-schneier, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, ai-ethics

President Trump says there will be no deal with Iran, only unconditional surrender, as the US and Israel continue their bombardment of Tehran and other Iranian cities. The Iranian authorities say more than 1,200 people have been killed since attacks began last Saturday. In ...

Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhattan Kentucky Fried Chicken. The Colonel, then estranged from the company he founded, strolled into the kitchen afte...

The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects, including Egyptian temples, Greek oil flasks, van Gogh paintings, and cuneiform tablets.

In this episode, we consider a creature we often don’t think much about—the snail. And not just snails, but their sex lives. Which, as it turns out, is epic. There is persuasion and subterfuge, spaghetti penises and co-copulation. And this very surprising habit—erm kink—of m...

Ethan W. Anderson, on Twitter/X:

I’ve plotted the most expensive McDonald’s burger and the least expensive MacBook over time. This analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081.

Looking to the past, if you plug $599 in today’s money into an inflation calculator, that’s just ~$190 in 1984, the year the original Macintosh launched with a price of $2,495 (which works out to ~$7,800 today.)

Link: x.com/ethan_is_online/status/2029331836137291941?s=42

John McCoy: From around 1970 to 1980, the Salem, Massachusetts-based Parker Brothers (now a brand of Hasbro) published games whose innovative and fanciful designs drew inspiration from Pop Art, Op Art, and Madison Avenue advertising. They had boxes, boards, and component...

“If measles-mumps-rubella vaccination rates decline 1% annually for the next five years, associated medical and societal costs could reach $1.5 billion.” (That 1% is a conservative estimate “given current policy and coverage trajectory”.)

Steve Jobs, on Apple’s quarterly results call back in October 2008: There are some customers which we choose not to serve. We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that. Harry McCracken, writing at the time:...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code that it writes. This is what makes coding agents so much more useful than LLMs that simply spit out code without any way to verify it. Never assume that code g...

The US Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, said the amount of firepower over Iran was about to surge dramatically. The Israeli military said it had begun a "broad scale" wave of strikes against infrastructure in Tehran. The head of US central command, Admiral Brad Cooper, said Iran's current and future missile capabilities were being destroyed. Iran, for its part, has continued to hit back and several Gulf states, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain have said they have intercepted several Iranian missiles. Meanwhile, the United States has eased its embargo on Russian oil, after prices rose because of the Iran war. President Trump has sacked his Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem. Also, scientists in Britain discover the dietary habits in the Stone Age, and how to tell if a Stradivarius violin is real or fake?

Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager Adnan Khan describes a devious attack chain against the Cline GitHub repository, which started with a prompt injection attack in the title of an issue opened against the repo. Cline we...

Director Rian Johnson (Knives Out, Poker Face) wrote the review of the Thursday crossword puzzle for the NY Times today. “I love a good Thursday. The baffling special graphics, the wait-that-can’t-be-right puzzlement and that glorious ah-ha moment…”

Introducing GPT‑5.4 Two new API models: gpt-5.4 and gpt-5.4-pro, also available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI. August 31st 2025 knowledge cutoff, 1 million token context window. Priced slightly higher than the GPT-5.2 family with a bump in price for both models if you go above 27...

Pre-show: The best (but slowest) website on the internet Million Dollar Homepage 2013 BMW M5 (PDF) 2014 Honda Accord (PDF) M4 iPad Air iPhone 17e New displays (‼️) Studio Display 2 A19 per MacRumors Some excellent throwback snark from Jack Wellborn Studio Displ...

Earth’s gravity is lumpy. “The gravity in East Antarctica is measurably weaker than anywhere else on the planet.”