And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report abo
AIaillmsengineeringanalysis
Simon Willison's WeblogAug 22Score 0.8787042981481481
Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2 . #1608 , #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. l
AIaillmsengineeringanalysis
Simon Willison's WeblogAug 22Score 0.8769163351851851
The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way. Sometimes this involves reviewing every line o
OpenAI reaffirms Zero Data Retention for eligible API customers and previews Private Safety Processing for advanced AI safety without compromising data privacy.
I remember having a Spirograph as a kid and being obsessed with it. Its geometric patterns are hypnotic and gorgeous. I also love generative music composition. So bringing those two things together in a browser tab, I'm hooked. Musical Spirograph is a relative
W. Kamau Bell is one of those people who has always just seemed to be there. From Totally Biased, to Politically Re-Active, United Shades of America, and We Need to Talk About Cosby, his blend of comedy, social commentary, and political activism has helped him
A supply-chain attack targeting Android-based car head units is using a legitimate device-update app to spread malware that enlists compromised devices in a proxy botnet or uses them for ad fraud. [...]
Citing "significant increases in memory and storage component costs," Amazon has raised prices on Echos, Kindles, Fire TVs, and Eeros by up to 60 percent, as first reported by Fortune. The cheapest products in Amazon's lineup were hit hardest, with the Echo Do
Windows named pipes provide fast interprocess communication, but weak access controls can expose privileged services to untrusted processes. ThreatLocker explains how endpoint verification, command authorization, strict input validation, and narrowly scoped pr
Laptop prices are out of whack. $500 used to get you a tolerable laptop, and $900 got you a really good one. They often had similar CPU, RAM, and storage options because that stuff was comparatively cheap; the difference was often in build quality and screen r
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 141, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, I'm newish here too, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been getting back int
The existence of aggregate welfare gains from trade is one of the classic insights from international economics. However, these conventional welfare gains are static, in the sense that they take existing factor supplies and production technologies at a point i
Economyeconomyresearchworking-papersnber
NBER New Working PapersAug 23Score 0.7875000000000001
Which firms drive aggregate productivity growth? We document that firms with high price-earnings ratios tend to see increases in their subsequent earnings relative to sales, which we interpret as rents from ideas (innovation). We construct an endogenous growth
Economyeconomyresearchworking-papersnber
NBER New Working PapersAug 23Score 0.7875000000000001
This paper revisits the empirical evidence on capital structure adjustment and the prevalence of financing “inaction.” We show that the conclusion of infrequent leverage adjustment is sensitive to two methodological choices: high adjustment thresholds and reli
Economyeconomyresearchworking-papersnber
NBER New Working PapersAug 23Score 0.7875000000000001
We explore the welfare costs of the loss of animal life in a consequentialist total utilitarian framework that incorporates the intrinsic value of living beings through their sentience. Moral philosophy and neuroscience define sentience as the capacity for val
Economyeconomyresearchworking-papersnber
NBER New Working PapersAug 23Score 0.7875000000000001
We examine how prenatal exposure to air pollution interacts with gender-biased parental investments to shape long-run cognitive performance. Using nationally representative survey data from China, we show that fetal PM2.5 exposure significantly reduces cogniti
Audio recording of US vice-president apparently made at New York fundraiser and shared with Canadian Press Leaked audio from a private event has reportedly captured the US vice-president, JD Vance, mocking Canada for apparently capitulating in a trade deal and
No one yet knows which technology will power the quantum computers of the future, but the race to create them has already produced some of science’s most intricate machinery. The post Building a Quantum Computer, One Fragile Qubit at a Time first appeared on Q
Sciencesciencemathematicsphysicsbiology
The Guardian — WorldAug 21Score 0.7520174615740741
With plentiful jobs and community support, one Mexico City neighbourhood has become a haven for those who have lived much of their lives in the US With its wide avenues lined with tall palm trees, its quaint cafes and old-school cantinas, as well as the mix of
Geopoliticsgeopoliticsworld-newsinvestigative
MIT Technology ReviewAug 21Score 0.7503356069444445
A company that plans to beam sunlight from space to Earth on demand might unintentionally brighten the night sky for many more people than intended, according to a new study. Later this year, the US company Reflect Orbital plans to launch a test satellite call
Two rocks surrounded by coral, with a total land size of less than 10 square meters (approximately 108 square feet) at high tide, are the entire basis on which Japan claims a 150,000-square-mile exclusive economic zone, an area nearly the size of Japan itself.
Astronomers have found stars that repeatedly skim past supermassive black holes, surviving each encounter while producing a new burst of light. In some systems, those flares mysteriously fade with every return. Researchers now think the key may be stars that w
Security researcher Christopher Domas developed skitter-creek-bath-salts, an open-source hardware security tool that disrupts CPU privilege boundaries by manipulating memory controller translation registers. This allows unprivileged software to access protecte
"You cannot be at mental peace always. You will be worried. So even my family — they are scared all the time, and they were anxiously praying [for] the vessel [to] come out of this area safely." While Captain Chirag operates a commercial cargo vessel in
Greenland sharks may live for 400 years without suffering the kind of retinal decline normally associated with aging. Researchers found healthy eye tissue and active proteins specially adapted for seeing blue light in the dim Arctic depths. DNA repair mechanis
Anybody familiar with the gravity model of trade would be unsurprised that Wisconsin (exports) a lot to Canada. Figure 1: Wisconsin goods exports to world (black, right scale), Canada (blue, left scale), Mexico (red scale), mn.2017$. Nominal data deflated by B
Built by DeepMind alumni, British AI lab Inherent released Faraday, an AI agent whose ability to replicate scientific papers could be a stepping stone for innovation.
July 15 is the due date, but is often missed. So looking back in May, NEC Chair Hassett forecast 5% growth in 2027, on top of rapid 2026 growth forecasted by the Administration. How are things looking with two more quarters of reported growth? Figure 1: Report
SPGMI's estimate as of 8/3: Figure 1: NFP employment (bold blue), civilian employment with smoothed population controls (bold orange), industrial production (red), personal income excluding current transfers in Ch.2017$ (bold light green), manufacturing and tr
The rules have already been rejected by multiple state courts, but the Trump administration said it’s preparing in case of a favorable Supreme Court decision. The post Postal Service moves to finalize mail ballot regs before SCOTUS ruling appeared first on Cyb
Infinity Ward has deployed the first proper update to the Modern Warfare 4 beta , addressing a chunk of the feedback from the beta's opening day, including footstep audio, weapon lethality, and map voting. Read more
New console gameplay from developer Rebel Wolves and publisher Bandai Namco has confirmed The Blood of Dawnwalker won't offer a 60fps mode on PS5 or Xbox Series X/S when it launches next month Read more
Cloudflare recently introduced Kitesurf, a lightweight browser built for automated workloads. Kitesurf runs browser components in isolated WebAssembly/Rust environments on Cloudflare Workers and supports the Chrome DevTools Protocol, allowing tools such as Pla
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Friday that ByteDance-owned TikTok will pay $400 million to settle a 2024 lawsuit accusing the company of violating child privacy laws in the country. As part of the settlement, the social media platform will p
Securitysecurityhackingvulnerabilities
The Economist — Finance & EconomicsAug 19Score 0.722918836574074
People who speak several languages may have brains that age more slowly, with four-language speakers showing brains that appeared about 13 years younger than those of monolinguals. Starting earlier and becoming highly fluent were also linked to a stronger effe
Sciencescienceresearchdiscoveries
ScienceDaily — Top ScienceAug 22Score 0.7213469893518518
Astronomers using JWST have discovered that massive early galaxies contain far more small, faint stars than expected. That hidden population could make some of these galaxies three to four times more massive than previous estimates. The finding makes it even h
A new Silent Hill: Townfall gameplay trailer has offered up over 18 minutes of first-look footage while also quietly confirming exactly how long the game's PlayStation 5 exclusivity will last. Read more
Gaminggamingvideo-gamesnewsreviews
Ars Technica — ScienceAug 22Score 0.7192949675925926
Bruna Pereira explains how DoorDash built a content-agnostic AI moderation platform. She covers replacing costly LLM-only pipelines with a hybrid pattern: using fast internal models to filter obvious cases, LLM multi-axis scoring for nuanced decisions, and no-
ITitengineeringarchitecture
ScienceDaily — Top ScienceAug 22Score 0.7179576375
A simple yeast-based food supplement may help restore the immune system’s ability to fight cancer, according to new research in mice. Scientists found that yeast beta-glucan reprogrammed early immune cells in the bone marrow, leading to stronger, longer-lastin
Double Fine has confirmed it owns – or will shortly own – the intellectual property and publishing rights to every game it made during its seven years under Xbox following the studio's split from Microsoft earlier this year. Read more
At LinkedIn's scale, relying solely on human reviewers or simply putting an off-the-shelf AI reviewer in front of GitHub is not an effective way to manage PRs. To address this, LinkedIn engineers built a multi-agent AI code review platform that understands the
AWS has released aws-bench, an open-source benchmark for evaluating AI agents on real AWS tasks such as misconfigurations and infrastructure provisioning. Unlike traditional benchmarks, it uses real resources in disposable AWS accounts, scoring agent performan
But because agents often require guidance or additional context as they move through their tasks, Sharma, 27, finds himself wanting to be available to them around the clock and forgoing a regular sleep schedule as a result. Until recently, he couldn’t monitor
Check Point Research has disclosed a technique that uses Microsoft Defender's own legitimately signed boot-time remediation driver to perform arbitrary kernel-level file and registry operations on Windows systems ranging from Windows 7 through Windows 11 25H2,
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware family that's specifically designed to infect Android-based vehicle head unit firmware developed by DoFun. Kaspersky, which discovered the threat in June 2026, said the end goal of the malware is to serve a
Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Greg Casar want a GAO probe on the government’s use of spyware and other sophisticated hacking tools and authorities. The post Lawmakers seek watchdog review of federal hacking of Americans appeared first on CyberScoop .
The new AI security controls follow the Hugging Face incident last month, though many of these additions perhaps should have been in place prior to the frontier models escaping.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become one of this decade's defining technologies. From healthcare and finance to manufacturing and education, organizations increasingly rely on AI to automate repetitive tasks, uncover patterns hidden within large datasets, a
The spyware-equipped Manic, a persistent Grandoreiro campaign in Latin America and Europe, and an expanded ToxicPanda 2.0 malware. The post Banking Trojans Manic, Grandoreiro, ToxicPanda 2.0 in the Spotlight appeared first on SecurityWeek .
CISA has added one new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog , based on evidence of active exploitation. CVE-2026-64849 MLflow Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability This type of vulnerability is a frequent attack vector
Biogerontologists are exploring the upper limit for human life. A recent study has it verging on two centuries – but columnist Graham Lawton finds reason to be sceptical
Scrambling through dense salal in the dark, weaving between the majestic western red cedars of northern Haida Gwaii, I could barely imagine where we were just days before—crossing Dixon Entrance off the coast in an open skiff, pushing head-on through ocean swe
Ammonia is one of the most important chemicals produced in the world, ranking second only to sulfuric acid in the total volume produced each year. It is used mostly to make fertilizer, which is essential to feeding the world's population. Yet its producti