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Is the LLM response wrong, or have you just failed to iterate it? More from Mike Caulfield (see also the SIFT method). He starts with a fantastic example of Google's AI mode usually correctly handling a common piece of misinformation but occasionally falling for it (the curs...

I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done zero to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling.

At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter that LLM apps are at the top of virtually every app store nearly every day because individual people are choosing to download them, and the criticism hasn't been effective in slowing that?

— Anil Dash

Tags: ai-ethics, anil-dash, ai, generative-ai

The SIFT method The SIFT method is "an evaluation strategy developed by digital literacy expert, Mike Caulfield, to help determine whether online content can be trusted for credible or reliable sources of information." This looks extremely useful as a framework for helping p...

When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are. I'm glad I left that out, because it turns out Google's new "AI mode" is genuinely really good! It feels very ...

"Don't use chatbots as search engines" was great advice for several years... until it wasn't. I wrote about how good OpenAI's o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feels even better. I've started calling it my Research Goblin. I can assign a task t...

MG Siegler, writing at Spyglass: And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise — one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add — Anthropic h...

And so you can’t help but wonder if part of the equation in this settlement wasn’t decidedly more cynical. Fresh off a new massive fundraise – one in which they raised far more than they were initially targeting, I might add – Anthropic has a lot of money. More than perha...

I am once again shocked at how much better image retrieval performance you can get if you embed highly opinionated summaries of an image, a summary that came out of a visual language model, than using CLIP embeddings themselves. If you tell the LLM that the summary is going to be embedded and used to do search downstream. I had one system go from 28% recall at 5 using CLIP to 75% recall at 5 using an LLM summary.

— Jason Liu

Tags: vision-llms, generative-ai, ai, embeddings, llms, jason-liu

Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 New not-quite-MIT licensed model from Chinese Moonshot AI, a follow-up to the highly regarded Kimi-K2 model they released in July. This one is an incremental improvement - I've seen it referred to online as "Kimi K-2.1". It scores a little higher on a b...

RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation. There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred for this use case? You only have one ID for Apple eh? Companies are complex to ...

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement I wrote about the details of this case when it was found that Anthropic's training on book content was fair use, but they needed to have purchased individual copies of the books first... and they had seeded t...

We journey into New York City’s delis and bodegas, in search of a famous – and controversial – sandwich: the chopped cheese. This sandwich has become a cultural symbol and source of debate, and is so storied that some might call it a “folk sandwich.” Plus, we dig into the rich history of the corner store culture where the chopped cheese originated.    

This episode was produced in partnership with NYC Tourism.  

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Hayden Field, reporting for The Verge:

In what’s potentially the first major payout to creatives whose work was used to train AI systems, Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work. Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it’s “believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation.”

Link: theverge.com/anthropic/773087/anthropic-to-pay-1-5-billion…

After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated.

Feels like we can solve 90% of it by renaming DurableObject to StatefulWorker?

It's just a worker that has state. And because it has state, it also has to have a name, so that you can route to the specific worker that has the state you care about. There may be a sqlite database attached, there may be a container attached. Those are just part of the state.

— Kenton Varda

Tags: kenton-varda, sqlite, cloudflare

In August we performed a live taping of the show from a theater perched on the edge of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River, overshadowed by the wide open night sky. Three stories about voids. One about a fish that screams into the night – and the mystery of its counterpa...

Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children. “Florida is the first state to take the courageous step toward decluttering itself of excess children, but under the inexpert guidance of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., other states may follow.”

One of the last remaining World War II Victory Gardens in the U.S is quietly growing across from Boston’s Fenway Park. 

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Introducing EmbeddingGemma

Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google:

Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is trained on 100+ languages and is small enough to run on less than 200MB of RAM with quantization.

It's available via sentence-transformers, llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama, LMStudio and more.

As usual for these smaller models there's a Transformers.js demo (via) that runs directly in the browser (in Chrome variants) - Semantic Galaxy loads a ~400MB model and then lets you run embeddings against hundreds of text sentences, map them in a 2D space and run similarity searches to zoom to points within that space.

Tags: google, ai, embeddings, transformers-js, gemma

Any time I share my collection of tools built using vibe coding and AI-assisted development (now at 124, here's the definitive list) someone will inevitably complain that they're mostly trivial. A lot of them are! Here's a list of some that I think are genuinely useful and w...