FeedCity

To evaluate the model’s capability in processing long-context inputs, we construct a video “Needle-in- a-Haystack” evaluation on Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct. In this task, a semantically salient “needle” frame—containing critical visual evidence—is inserted at varying tempo...

It’s been a really tough year for many of us, the citizens of the world. But on this day of thanksgiving in the US, I wanted to ask you all: what are you thankful for today?

I’m thankful that I was able to travel to say goodbye to a friend, thankful for the time I’ve spent with my kids over their holiday break, and thankful for all of you, especially those who support the site with a membership, a small front in what feels like the final stand of the open web. Thank you.

Tags: holidays

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deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-Math-V2

New on Hugging Face, a specialist mathematical reasoning LLM from DeepSeek. This is their entry in the space previously dominated by proprietary models from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, both of which achieved gold medal scores on the International Mathematical Olympiad earlier this year.

We now have an open weights (Apache 2 licensed) 685B, 689GB model that can achieve the same. From the accompanying paper:

DeepSeekMath-V2 demonstrates strong performance on competition mathematics. With scaled test-time compute, it achieved gold-medal scores in high-school competitions including IMO 2025 and CMO 2024, and a near-perfect score on the undergraduate Putnam 2024 competition.

Tags: mathematics, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-reasoning, deepseek, llm-release, ai-in-china

I just added “Polaroid” to the list of film formats to my focal length equivalents site.

Gastro Obscura writer Sam O’Brien takes co-host Kelly McEvers on a tour of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous tributes to the turkey – and makes her case for why these big, beautiful birds are worth paying attention to.       

Read Sam’s article on the history of the turkey: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-the-turkey-thanksgiving

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Sam Roberts, reporting for The New York Times:

David Lerner, a high school dropout and self-taught computer geek whose funky foothold in New York’s Flatiron district, Tekserve, was for decades a beloved discount mecca for Apple customers desperate to retrieve lost data and repair frozen hard drives, died on Nov. 12 at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 72. [...]

Tekserve specialized in finding the cures for sick computers — including insect infestations — and recovering first novels and other priceless data, which the company said it was able to do about 85 percent of the time.

“We only charged for success,” Mr. Lerner said.

There were many great independent Apple resellers from the pre-Apple-Store era. There was only one that was legendary: Tekserve.

Link: nytimes.com/2025/11/26/technology/personaltech/david-lerner…

Regarding my earlier post on similarities between the 2010 App Store Guidelines and today’s: Notably absent from the current guidelines (I think for a very long time) is the specious but very Jobsian claim that “If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.” Getting the press on your side is one of the best ways for a developer to get an unjust App Store review decision overturned. Apple loathes negative publicity.

Link: daringfireball.net/linked/2025/11/26/november-update-to-the…

Here’s the updated full guideline for section 4.1: 4.1 Copycats (a) Come up with your own ideas. We know you have them, so make yours come to life. Don’t simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another app’s name or...

Perhaps inspired by All Streets, Ben Fry’s map of all the streets in the US, Nelson Minar built a US map out of all the rivers in the country. Minar put all the data and files he used up on Github so you can make your own version. [This is a vintage post originally from Jun 2013.] Tags: Ben Fry · maps · Nelson Minar · timeless posts · USA

“Art is valuable precisely because it is not easy to create. We are interested in art, in any and all of its forms, because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.”

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If Quantum Computing Is Solving “Impossible” Questions, How Do We Know They’re Right? “In order to validate quantum computers, methods are needed to compare theory and result without waiting years for a supercomputer to perform the same task.”

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This is the trailer for an HBO documentary called Thoughts and Prayers about “the impact of the $3 billion active shooter preparedness industry on schools and communities across America”. It’s tough to watch, as is this clip from the film in which a girl describes a bag o...

In a London increasingly dominated by rideshare services, some drivers are still opting to study for years for The Knowledge, “the grueling examination that requires applicants to essentially memorize more than 100 square miles of city streets”.

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21st-Century Culture Has Hit a Wall. “We — creators and audiences alike — have to make an effort to encourage bold new forms of culture. Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than overly market-tested products.”

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Konnichiwa! I’m back from Japan and finally getting over my jetlag, which took much longer than I expected. Here’s a list of all the things I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.1 Let us know what movies, books, art, TV, music, ...

Carpets are everyday objects we rarely stop to think about. But they’re far more than decoration or something soft to step on. Each one holds an origin story – threads that run through centuries of history, connecting small villages of master weavers to sprawling, power-hungry empires.

Historian Dorothy Armstrong, author of Threads of Empire: A History of the World in Twelve Carpets, takes us on a journey through the surprising and global story of carpets.

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I talked with CL Kao and Dori Wilson for an episode of their new Data Renegades podcast titled Data Journalism Unleashed with Simon Willison. I fed the transcript into Claude Opus 4.5 to extract this list of topics with timestamps and illustrative quotes. It did such a good ...

Chindōgu is the Japanese practice of inventing things that are not exactly useful but neither are they useless; they’re more unuseless, a term coined by chindōgu’s originator Kenji Kawakami. Some examples are tiny umbrellas for shoes, chopsticks with a tiny fan on them to co...

My Car Is Becoming a Brick. “Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects” but now “certain models are destined to age their way out of compatibility with the latest software” (like smartphones).

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