Pantone just updated their Color Of The Year

🚨 The DOJ appears to have redacted Donald Trump’s name from the allegations made in this exhibit in the Epstein files. Trump’s name was in the original release. Now, it’s blacked out. See for yourself.

Trump's Epstien cover-up is the most incompetent cover-up ever.

No signs of an end to rapid gains in AI ability at ever-decreasing costs (which is a log scale) yet. I have to update this monthly or more frequently at this point. All AI benchmarks are flawed, but GPQA Diamond has been a pretty good one, though likely close to being maxed out.

Cross-posting this one from METR. If you've seen this graph before, you're probably going to be pretty interested in the new update. If you've never seen this graph before, please just ignore this post. Just a guy and his charts, nothing to see here.

Before jumping to conclusions on *anything* in these docs, beware that if you’re not an expert in this case or grooming in general, you likely have no idea about how this stuff works in practice. E.g. It’s well documented that Epstein’s victims were incentivised to recruit new victims.

Incredibly precise manipulation from Kyber Labs

For ten years, Tesla FSD has been the grift that keeps on grifting. I don't expect that to change in 2026.

A few days ago, a very cool preprint went up on how the brain processes prosody — the melody of speech. This is one of those studies that I feel like helped me understand my brain better. So it's the topic of this week's post, which ends with a little future-studies wish list for science Santa 🎅🧪

Latest 'annual stats' message arrives from Life360 app and JFC absolutely not OK on any level.

Fascinating AI paper #1: Researchers made a conversational "living novel" out of 20,000 Leagues. They wanted to solve LLMs' "persona drift," but I can see this becoming a commercial product soon. With what fiction would you want to chat? arxiv.org/pdf/2512.07474

The audio recording of our conversation from my book launch with Ted Chiang and James Yu is now available! I present Artificial Humanities, James runs a demo of using models for creative writing, and then we discuss burning questions around AI and writing: www.commonwealthclub.org/events/archi...

This is a great read, especially for those who claim to be able to detect “ChatGPT” written content - you’re most likely picking up on “Imperial British English” taught as a foreign language, and specifically the version taught to and used by Kenyans…

First it was "just porn," then it was social media, now messaging apps and image filters. And it's not just kids, it's all of us. The number of places online where one has to show papers or disclose identity grows rapidly. So are the places the government (or AI) needs access, without encryption.

UK to push for nudity-blocking software on devices to protect children www.ft.com/content/0ef7... (£) ● Ministers have twigged that age-gating porn might incentivise teens to make their own ● Vendors are dangling shiny tech solutions in front of their faces #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #techpolicy

The absurdity of UK policy gets much easier to understand when you remember that most policy suggestions are the outcome of a vendor's sales pitch. www.ft.com/content/0ef7...

Unless the 95% consisted of mostly large publishers, they should either be ignored (easier & cheaper), or made to submit a detailed follow up explaining what they *think* their position will achieve. In reality, all it’d do is cement large publishers rights, who will then make deals with AI orgs.

No. AI should absolutely not pay taxes. To deal with AI taking jobs, the playing field needs to be levelled & tax system reformed over time. Human income tax should gradually be reduce to 0, as corporation tax is gradually increased to make up human & AI shortfall, plus tax loopholes closed.

Anthropic Outage for Opus 4.5 and Sonnet 4/4.5 across all services | Discussion

Uh oh, Anthropic having a major outage across all models it seems 😭

Incredible footage out of Australia, confirmed by NEWS AU, of a brave bystander neutralizing one of the terrorists in the Bondi Beach attack which took place during a Hanukkah gathering. Australian authorities say multiple people have been killed. At least two suspects are in custody.

OpenAI using AI to infer over 18 status from conversations seems fraught with problems, not least the amount of poorly educated, non-English speaking, or mentally disadvantaged users that use AI assistance for exactly those reasons. In an age of agents, give LLMs a damn age verification tool!

This is why we cannot and must not rely on US tech giants. Amazon is among the worst but none of them is safe. They are all instruments of the Trump regime.

Robin Ince reveals to last night’s audience at a recording of Infinite Monkey Cage that the BBC has forced him to resign over his support of trans people

Apparently Amazon are allowing the download of DRM free books from Jan 2026. The publisher has to choose to opt out of Amazon DRM, and does *not* mean all Amazon books will suddenly be DRM free. www.mobileread.com/forums/showt...

The fuck is happening in this framed photo three feet away from Steve Bannon?

My favorite of the Olmo 3 paper: Transparent auditing of the cost for the v3 models (not 3.1), based of wall clock time for pre/post train, evals, cluster issues, etc, as a counter to the famous $5.576M for DeepSeek V3 at $2/H100 hour, Olmo 3 start to end would cost $2.75M allenai.org/papers/olmo3

Given the current political climate, and the US Government social media accounts love of AI, I expect we’ll see racist, misogynistic, and anti-immigrant Disney-style memes normalised long before a porn scandal. Not forgetting that OpenAI is shortly about to make ChatGPT NSFW friendly.

For people who trusted copyright laws to rein in AI, this should be the last scene in Animal Farm. “They looked from IP to Tech, and from Tech to IP, but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

Discord, who recently leaked a heap of personal data in a security breach, wants my personal data to let me access a channel I created in a server I created. Thank you, Australian government.

Northern Ireland continues show off just how broken UK counter-terrorism law has become...

This looks interesting for a small agentic coding model runnable on local setups. Very curious to know how capable it is in practice vs. claimed benchmark scores: huggingface.co/mistralai/De...

“Amazon claims the face data is encrypted and never shared with others” Despite the face data coming directly from its built in camera, whose footage it regularly shares with law enforcement? How does this apply to neighbours walking past on the street? This needs serious regulation. Urgently.

Rajeev Ranjan One Word Is Not Enough: Simple Prompts Improve Word Embeddings https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06744

Love how the response to "social media is dangerous, toxic and damaging" is "ban children" and not "hold platforms accountable".

Gizmodo has 2.5 MILLION followed on X, and this has been up for 14 hours. All of you still using it for The Engagement: what am I missing here???

Holy CRAP. Retired engineer takes random pics of *kids*, without consent or attribution, bins them into “autistic” or “not autistic”, and uploads that “data” for free on Kaggle. Well over a HUNDRED papers are published, 38 in Springer Nature, 25 in IEEE, using it. And no reviewers objected? WTF.🧪

Blimey, even Dropbox is feeling the financial heat - they’re sending out emails that they’re removing content from accounts over their limit. I cancelled my subscription nearly 10 years ago but left ~1TB files there for free (read only). Looks like the free ride is up in Feb 2026 😭

Home Office kept police facial recognition flaws to itself, UK data watchdog fumes

This is the teleportation equivalent of online games forgetting to mute their headset while they go to the toilet 😂 …speaking of which, I wonder how long until we literally see an absent minded teleoperator version of that play out 🤔

I’m in no way defending FIFA when I say this, but given they *have* to deal with Trump & his bullshit, the *real* genius of their fake peace prize was to give him his own gold world-cup like trophy. After his Super Bowl(?) antics, you just know Trump would try to grab the actual World Cup 1/2

First of many such incidents, I expect. Another ‘win’ for those ‘useful’ Gen AI tools. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Ignore the infighting in the story. The key new point is that the sightings don’t appear to have had any real connection to the Zelenskiy flight in time or location. The flight was publicly trackable; if there actually were drones disruption would have been easy. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025...

Farage’s Schoolboy Antics. youtu.be/5OaXTd7__Ys?...

The fact that four hostile drones tried to hit Zelenskyy’s plane & it’s barely a blip in the news cycle should terrify everyone. We’ve been dragged so deep into the chaos era that an attempted strike on a world leader doesn’t even break through. When this becomes normal, the world is in real danger.

This Pluribus ad on a fridge caused a schizophrenic woman named Carol to be hospitalized.

Holy shit. Reuters reporting that new admin instructions on visas are if you worked at a platform in trust & safety or content moderation or on fact checking or online safety at an platform you *and your loved ones* are ineligible for H-1B visa. www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

The UK Government is slowly drip feeding legislation for the next major legal scandal; Increasing use of Facial Recognition at the same time as reducing the right to Jury trials for less serious crimes. 1/2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...