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I appreciate the plain speech of Science magazine’s Derek Lowe in his recent piece, The Assault On Science Funding Continues. When I talk to people about this subject (and that includes some journalists as well) and say what I’m about to at the end of this paragaph I am so...

Deep inside the Moon’s permanently shadowed craters lies a hidden treasure: ice. If we can harness it for water, fuel, and construction, these frozen, lightless pits could become the perfect place for humanity’s first permanent Moon base. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesag...

A new Citation Needed data project maps the Trump family’s web of cryptocurrency ventures, which have been generating billions in income for the president.

Welp, right at the top of the CDC page on autism and vaccines: “The claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim because studies have not ruled out the possibility that infant vaccines cause autism.” 🫨

"Charles Ross spent 50 years building 'Star Axis,' a naked-eye observatory in New Mexico. Now his masterwork is ready. How to share it with a changed world?"

In the 1980s, a group of friends on the track team at Sul Ross State University hauled a discarded dorm room desk to the top of a mountain. They left a notebook there to keep track of their run times and leave little notes for each other. Then… other people found it. And then… it started a tradition.

Visit the Atlas entry for the Sul Ross desk, and learn more about the archives containing the Sul Ross desk notebooks.

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An Inside Look at the Relay Market Powering Token Resellers and Fraud Fascinating investigation by Matt Lenhard into the market that has grown up around reselling LLM tokens at a discount by pooling API keys from various sources. This looks to be mostly a thing in China. Res...

Release: sqlite-utils 3.39.1

I back-ported a fix for table.delete_where() that shipped in version 4.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Ruff v0.16.0 Astral shipped a significant new version of their Ruff Python linting tool a few days ago on July 23rd. I noticed today because my various CI jobs all started failing thanks to new default Ruff checks and my unpinned "ruff" dev dependency. From Brent Westbrook's...

Fascinating essay by Nikhil Suresh: On a trip overseas, I had the privilege of a meeting with one of the Fortune 500 executives mentioned at the beginning of the post, who will remain anonymous so that they are not executed by firing squad by their board. As we were chat...

The European Commission on Thursday: The Commission found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search, thereby breaching its obligations under the DMA...

Julien Khaleghy, CEO of SerpApi: The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted our motion to dismiss Google’s lawsuit, marking a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We’re pleased that the court rejected Google’s...

Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.

See also: Techmeme’s roundup of commentary.

Link: apple.com/newsroom/2026/07/apple-maps-to-power-navigation…

Teddy Rosenbluth, reporting for The New York Times: On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that there have been 2,318 confirmed cases of measles so far this year. The case count toppled the record set last year, when measles infected more tha...

For a long time the best native Mac IRC client was Textual, but although Textual still works, it’s been sunset by the author. Not to fear, however. Fredrik Blank just launched bIRC: Creating an IRC client in 2026 is not something that will pay the bills : ) It would be j...

In this episode I discuss the link between the acoustic guitar and the decline of popular music culture.

My Beato Club supporters:
Justin Scott
Terence Mark
Jason Murray
Lucienne Kilpatrick
Alexander Young
Jason Wagner
Todd Ladner
Rob Kline
Nicholas Long
Tim Benson
Leonardo Martins da Costa Rodrigues
Eddie Perez
David Solomon
MICHAEL JOYCE
Stephen Stubbs
colin stead
Jonathan Wentworth-Linton
Patrick Payne
MATTHEW KARIS
Matthew Barouch
Shaun Samuels
Danny Kurywchak
Gregory Reedy
Sean Coleman
Alexander Verbitskiy
CL Turner
Jason Pappafotis
John Fulford
Margaret Carno
Robert C
David M Combs
Eric Flatt
Reto Spoerli
Herr Moritz Adam
Monte St. Johns
Jon Beezley
Peter DeVault
Eric Nabstedt
Eric Beggs
Rich Germano
Brian Bloom
Peter Pillitteri
Piush Dahal
Toby Guidry

More than any of these eval scores, what is most exciting to me is something else: Opus 5 is our least prompt injectable model yet. It is a bit buried in the system card, but across PI evals and red teaming, Opus 5 is very hard to prompt inject successfully.

— Boris Cherny, here's that System Card section, page 73

Tags: prompt-injection, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, boris-cherny

Introducing Claude Opus 5 I've been offline kayaking with sea otters for much of today so I haven't had a chance to put Anthropic's new model Claude Opus 5 through its paces yet. The buzz is positive, and Anthropic's description of it as a "thoughtful and proactive model tha...