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Abolishing pandemics/ Getting out of the way of AI automation/ Learning from Honk Kong MTR's business model

Today's links Technocarcinization: Enshittification is the great leveler. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Grampa's backyard Disneyland; Elizabeth Warren on monopolies; Spotify v Apple (antitrust edn); Exxon lobbyist confesses; "When the Sparrow&nbs...

Unlocking the door from the inside.

The post It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway: Changing administrative settings appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The CRA created an open-source steward role, then left maintenance unfunded.

The earliest dated article still active on Tom’s Hardware Guide is dated July 1, 1996. It was an article about CPU softmenus, something we pretty much take for granted today, but at the time was only available on select Abit

The post The earliest surviving Tom’s Hardware Guide article appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Uit een vandaag verschenen onderzoeksrapport (PDF) blijkt dat de AIVD en MIVD slordig en soms onrechtmatig omgaan met bulkdatasets. Bulkdatasets zijn grote bestanden vol data over vaak miljoenen willekeurige mensen, data die op een of andere manier in het bezit van de diensten gekomen is. Uit het rapport: “De diensten kunnen bulkdatasets bijvoorbeeld verkrijgen van informanten, andere overheidsorganisaties, buitenlandse inlichtingendiensten, of tegen betaling van commerciële partijen. De diensten kunnen ook bijzondere bevoegdheden inzetten om bulkdatasets te verwerven.

• "The Nuremberg Trial" by John Tusa and Ann Tusa - a detailed, meticulously researched account of the Nuremberg Trials. There's not a whole lot of side questing in this book - it's all focused on the trials themselves. Interesting read overall, though somewhat dry and academic.
• "Things Become Other Things: A Walking …

This morning I wrote a post that included the central Delannoy numbers. The nth central Delannoy number Dn counts the number of ways a king can move from one corner of a chessboard to the diagonally opposite corner without backtracking. The more general Delannoy numbers Dm,n are the analogy for an m × n rectangular board, not […]

The post DNA Sequence Alignment and Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

We’ve received notice that the Department of Commerce has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5.

We'll begin restoring access tomorrow, and will share an update soon.

— Anthropic, on Twitter

Tags: anthropic, claude, generative-ai, claude-mythos, ai, llms

When most people think “river” I bet they think “personal identity.”

Nano Banana 2 Lite

Also known as Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Image (gemini-3.1-flash-lite-image in their API), this is the "fastest and cheapest Gemini image model, engineered for velocity and scale".

I used AI studio to run this prompt:

Do a where's Waldo style image but it's where is the raccoon holding a ham radio

I like that one better than the results I got from the other Nano Banana models when I tried this back in April. It spelled Forest Festival wrong in two different ways though.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, gemini, text-to-image, llm-release, nano-banana

What's new in Claude Sonnet 5 Claude Sonnet 5 came out this morning. I always head straight for the "what's new" developer docs because they tend to have more actionable information than the official announcement post. Anthropic say of Sonnet 5 that "its performance is close...

Imagine the following dialog. Professor: f is a function of a real variable x that takes a real parameter k. Student: What’s a parameter? Professor: It’s a constant that can vary. Student: Then if it can vary, isn’t it a variable? Professor: Sorta, but no not really. This conversation plays out over and over, and unfortunately it often […]

The post Distinguishing variables from parameters first appeared on John D. Cook.

The AI Compass

This political compass style quiz by bambamramfan is pretty neat - answer 29 questions about AI and AI ethics to see which of the 30 archetypes you best fit.

I'm impressed that my answers on my first time through the quiz categorized me as "The Garage Tinkerer", patron saint myself!

It's implemented as a single page React app using the <script type="text/babel"> trick to avoid the necessary build step. Here's the code.

Via @erisianrite.com

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

shot-scraper video is a new command introduced in today's shot-scraper 1.10 release which accepts a storyboard.yml file defining a routine to run against a web application and uses Playwright to record a video of that routine. I've written before about the importance of havi...

Release: shot-scraper 1.10

The big new feature is shot-scraper video storyboard.yml, described in detail in Have your agent record video demos of its work with shot-scraper video.

Tags: shot-scraper

How's the view?! Back to business, it's now 8 years ago that Scott and I thought it would be a cool idea to build Why no HTTPS? We used the site to shame companies for not implementing their transport later security property, and to make it

Watch now (94 mins) | Math is where we’ll see superintelligence first. What will it look like?

Golden rectangles The defining property of golden rectangle is that if you stick a square on its longer side, you get another golden rectangle. The smaller vertical rectangle is similar to the larger horizontal rectangle. This means φ / 1 = (1 + φ) / φ which tells us φ² = 1 + φ and […]

The post Silver Rectangles and the Ways of Kings first appeared on John D. Cook.

Made it to another midpoint.

The post 2026 mid-year link clearance appeared first on The Old New Thing.