FeedCity

Two months ago, revisiting Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s year-prior prediction that AI would soon be writing 90+ percent of all programming code, I wrote: But where I think Amodei’s remarks, quoted above, are facile is that it hasn’t played out as simply that lines of cod...

Press release last week: SightMD, a leading ophthalmology practice in the greater New England area, today announced a historic milestone in surgical innovation. Dr. Eric Rosenberg, DO, MSE, has become the first surgeon in the world to successfully perform cataract surger...

Bryan Hoch, reporting for MLB.com:

A colorful personality who engaged and entertained fans with a distinct conversational style, Sterling called 5,426 regular-season Yankees games and 225 more in the postseason from 1989 until his retirement in 2024. After initially stepping away from the microphone in April of that year, Sterling returned to call selected games late in the ’24 season, including each contest of the World Series.

At the time of his initial retirement, Sterling said that he considered himself to be “a very blessed human being,” noting that he had lived out a childhood dream of broadcasting on the radio for more than 64 years.

“It’s your medium. You do what you want,” Sterling once said. “You have to paint the picture, which I love doing.”

That’s baseball, Suzyn.

Link: mlb.com/news/john-sterling-passes-away

One man's obsession with microscopic creatures is literally illuminated in marvelous transparencies.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Vibrant Victorian-Era Transparencies Illuminate a Host of Microscopic Creatures appeared first on Colossal.

How Sylvester Stallone Rescued the First Rambo Film With a Radical Recut, Cutting It From 3½ Hours to 93 Minutes. “The solution that ended up saving the movie wasn’t much less drastic, producing a 93-minute cut that excised most of Rambo’s dialogue.”

Gil Durán, posting on Bluesky:

It’s official! I’m permanently banned from X for tweeting “TLDR: Fascism.” (appeal denied)

“TLDR: Fascism” was Durán’s two-word response to this 1,000-word essay from Palantir describing their vision for a “Technological Republic”. (Alternative link to essay if you don’t want to visit x.com.)

Getting perma-banned from Twitter/X by Elon Musk gives Durán a nice Streisand-effect boost to promote his upcoming new book, The Nerd Reich. If the book is even half as good as its title it should be a bestseller.

Link: bsky.app/profile/gilduran.com/post/3mky5taqg3222

I don’t want to spoil any of this story from David Gelphman, which he wrote back in 2013, but which I only came across this week had read so long ago I’d forgotten it. Go read it. But before you do, one bit of context you should keep in mind is that the original iPad was unveiled at a special Apple event on 27 January 2010, but it didn’t ship until early April. Gelphman’s story takes place in that interregnum.

Link: davidgelphman.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/2-letters-from-steve…

Producers India Rice and Morgan Johnson take you beyond this planet as they share two stories tied to the franchise Star Wars.

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A follow-up point to Friday’s post about Meta unceremoniously shitcanning its entire contract with Sama, the Kenyan contractor that employed over 1,100 contractors to serve as Mechanical Turks for Meta’s AI efforts, after a few of the contractors told investigative reporters...

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships.

— Anthropic, How people ask Claude for personal guidance

Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, claude, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms, sycophancy

/elsewhere/sightings/

I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I decided to add those to my blog.

I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt.

As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive pages, and in site search results.

I back-populated over a decade of iNaturalist sightings, which means you can search for lemur you'll see my lemur photos from Madagascar in 2019!

Tags: blogging, photography, wildlife, ai, inaturalist, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code

Regarding my earlier post about the cleverness of Tim Cook’s solution to Apple’s dilemma regarding how to apply for, and accept, a potential tariff refund check without drawing the ire of Donald “Tariff Is My Favorite Word” Trump, at least one reader asked why Tim Cook comm...

Ohhhhh dear, Richard Dawkins: Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude Appears to Be Conscious. “My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.” 😬

Unruly Play: “A collection of 169 works of play in unlikely places. Games about unusual things. Unexpected encounters.”

Ada Palmer & Bruce Schneier: AI Learns Language From Skewed Sources. That Could Change How We Humans Speak – and Think. “Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.”

Remember the appalling but utterly-unsurprising story two months ago where a team of investigative reporters in Sweden uncovered a company in Kenya contracted by Meta to review video content captured by Meta’s “smart” glasses? They spoke to some of the workers, who told tale...

Kim Dacres gravitates toward renewal and care, transforming worn rubber into expressive sculptural portraits.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Kim Dacres Revitalizes Sleek Tires, Chains, and Gears in Defiant Sculptures appeared first on Colossal.