FeedCity

Today's links Anti-vax/anti-trust: Remembering saves lives. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disneyland prisoner; HOAs v xeriscaping; Copyright Office x regulatory capture; The women held a vote; Open licenses v uncopyrightable subjects; Largest pri...

Just over a year ago I wrote Why we should anthropomorphize LLMs. Now it’s a hot topic again, driven by Dwarkesh Patel’s description of OpenAI’s recent swarm breakout as a sequence of AI “civilizations”. In 2025, my argument for anthropomorphism went like this: AIs are trai...

Lots to consider

I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...]

We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered effort to flatten it before the original research project has time to reach its full potential. The incentives may now be pointing in the direction of no longer sharing any promising research directions with the broader community, which would reverse centuries of traditions of open science and do serious long-term damage to the future of the field.

— Terence Tao

Tags: ai-ethics, mathematics, ai

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem Impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize si...

Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5 OpenAI's image generation models are apparently used "more than 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image models in the API". This latest release improves their instruction-following ability across multiple turns, responds faster...

Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and deploying so many fixes each month.

Nine troubling new reports in seven days

Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces side by side as static images. What mat...

UPSes are typically the most boring part of your homelab, but they're important. One of their main jobs is to give servers time to shut down safely if the power goes out. Another job is to condition your power so your servers can run smoothly.

To do both of those things well, you need a smart interface. And at least with APC, there are tons of older UPSes that use Network Management Cards. The one pictured below is the NMC 2, and I pulled out of my old APC Smart-UPS 2200 XL (pictured above).

Breaking down 6 years of pretraining progress into data vs model improvements

For a driver that needs high resolution mode only in Windows.

The post A sample use of the <CODE>winstart.bat</CODE> file in Windows 95 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

There are rumors that a long-standing math problem, one of the Millennium Prize problems, has been solved. The problem concerns technical properties of solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations [1], an equation that describe the dynamics of fluid flow. Popular accounts of the problem are often oversimplified and misleading. Some reports will speak of the problem […]

The post Navier-Stokes in the news first appeared on John D. Cook.

Imagining how to report a memory allocation failure for a sparse page.

The post Why don’t we allow stacks to be sparse, instead of forcing them to be contiguous? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Small Go modules for people who build package-manager tooling.

Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them? My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to tell me why I'm wrong. Here's my thinking: Table of ContentsCausesIs that a problem?What are we…

Compuserve was an online service for dialup modems from the 1970s to the 1990s. It was a way of getting online and communicating with others before the Internet was generally available to individuals. Later, it became a primary way for

The post What happened to Compuserve? appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Release: llm 0.35

• New OpenAI model: gpt-6-astra for GPT-6 Astra.

Tags: openai, llm, gpt-6-astra

Automated AI text detection is currently an underserved niche. The only game in town is Pangram, which does an excellent job but desperately needs more competition. In a few years, I would be surprised if every major social network doesn’t scan new posts1 and comments for AI...

Creepy crawlies

Konstantin Ryabitsev discusses how bad the "background radiation" of abusive crawlers has become from the perspective of git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel:

TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of legitimate access, including git clones. At any one time, across 5 geo-distributed nodes, there are 14 CPU cores doing nothing but rendering git commits as html.

I worry about this a lot from the perspective of Datasette, which serves a huge number of crawlable web pages.

Via Hacker News

Tags: crawling, git, linux, datasette, ai-ethics