the observatory
432 signals · 42 fresh — the day's best catch, ranked by resonance.
Author’s Note: This article is not about ‘endless wars’ as a critique of U.S. military interventions — that debate belongs elsewhere. It examines a distinct and increasingly visible pattern: how U.S. adversaries wage continuous, long-term conflict against the United States…
TLDR: On Llama-3.3-70B, I found thoughts it cannot see that are actively steering its behavior; and Anthropic's released NLA (Natural Language Autoencoder) reads them anyway. When asked if it sees a hidden thought, the model says "No, let's move on"; the NLA reads "elephants",…
Today's links How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech: Their common enemies are Trump and his tech giants. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Sex work synonyms; Carthedral; French pirates; Suffragette surveillance; Hidden library…
A spotted lanternfly stands in front of the skyline of New York City in August 2023, in Weehawken, New Jersey. | Gary Hershorn/Getty Images Last summer, I was standing on a block near my house when I saw a very distinctive bug skittering up a tree trunk. It had a polka-dotty…
Graham Platner at a town hall on June 7, 2026, in Portland, Maine. Laura Brett/Getty Images It wasn’t a surprise, but it was a bombshell. On July 6, 2026, Politico published the detailed account of a Maine woman who said she had been sexually assaulted by Maine Democratic Senate…
Introduction: To help mobile developers run LLMs on devices, we use quantization to compress models. This blog builds on a previous quantization blog and gives a practical overview of various quantization techniques. We focus on the key challenges specific to LLMs and the…
🏆 Highlights Add LazyFrame.gather (#27501) Nested common subplan elimination (#27340) Stabilize streaming engine (#27497) Speed up parquet metadata decode with hand-written Thrift (#27427) Add streaming support for grouped AsOf join (#27293) 🚀 Performance improvements…
⚠️ Important note on release candidates This is a Release Candidate of OctoPrint. It is not a stable release: severe bugs can occur, and they can be bad enough that they make a manual downgrade to an earlier version necessary - maybe even from the command line. You should be…
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he…
Full author list: Ethan Roland*, Murat Cubuktepe*, Erick Martinez*, Stijn Servaes, Keenan Pepper, Mike Vaiana, Diogo Schwerz de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt, Addie Foote, Cem Anil, Alex Cloud; *Equal contribution tldr: Frontier AI models have knowledge that could be misused for…
“Where are the docs?” It’s a question nobody on a product team enjoys answering. The honest reply is usually some variant of “behind.” A writer is staring at a closed pull request, trying to reverse-engineer what changed. The pull request’s author has already moved on. By the…
Meg didn’t want to swing, but it didn’t matter. Her friend’s kid wanted her to swing. What was ostensibly a hangout for Meg and her friend was quickly overtaken, as it usually is, by the kids’ desire to be entertained. On the third hour of playing with her friend’s children at a…
Generative AI should be managed like a human source: useful, fast, sometimes brilliant, sometimes wrong, and never a substitute for disciplined questioning and human judgment. The three of us spent our careers in an environment where bad information costs lives. We learned early…
If you read anything about health or longevity, you’ll soon find yourself in a world of hazard ratios. Some study might say that eating more fiber might change your risk of dying by a factor of HR = 0.90. Another might say that occasional smoking might change it by HR = 1.30.…
This release of MicroPython sees machine.PWM support finally added to the stm32 port, as well as the alif port. This rounds out PWM support to all Tier 1 and Tier 2 microcontroller-based ports, making it easy to create and control PWM outputs in a consistent way. A new…
This is a bug fix release for various issues discovered after we released v1.5.1 What's Changed Backport various race condition fixes to v1.4 by @Mytherin in #20804 bump ref to azure for v1.4.4 (rebuild) by @benfleis in #20888 Internal #7584: AsOf Simple Joins by @hawkfish in…
BETA RELEASE! Marlin 2.1.3 is a major update focusing on stability, performance, and user interface. Pre-Built Firmware We now publish pre-built binaries for many common 3D printers and other machines, according to the tuned configuration examples donated by users like you!…
The most popular take on the standard free will debate is that you are the algorithm. Your preferences and reasoning that determine your actions IS free will. But this resolution leaves me not entirely satisfied because it means free will is binary - you either have it (you are…
Today's links CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code: With great abstraction comes great power comes great responsibility comes great loss of fidelity. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Real elections v reality TV; Copyright troll loses…
When Gaby Lieberman moved in with her boyfriend Elvin Pavlenko, she didn’t think she’d be so closely scrutinized by their neighbors. But from the start, she was fighting an uphill battle: Pavlenko spent his entire life on the same block in Teaneck, New Jersey; when he moved out…
“We [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] often times in the national security decision-making process or White House meetings -- outside of the Pentagon process -- will go back and forth between military issues and political issues. And I think it's incumbent upon us to kind of stay in,…
This is an essay that recently appeared in Asterisk. Consider the rest of the risk issue for all your risk needs. Lots of people die after overdosing on acetaminophen (paracetamol, Tylenol, Panadol). In the U.S., it’s estimated to cause 56,000 emergency department visits, 2,600…
Unreal Nanite is a virtualized geometry system for creating and rendering highly detailed 3D content . Nanite uses a highly compressed mesh format and a cluster-based streaming architecture . It displays only the pixel-scale detail visible to the camera, eliminating traditional…
This release of DuckDB is named "Variegata" after the paradise shelduck Tadorna Variegata, also known as the paradise duck, a species of Shelduck (a group of goose-like ducks), endemic to New Zealand. Please also refer to the announcement blog post:…
... government of the people, by the people, for the people ... The cost of AI is dropping rapidly. GPT-4-class capabilities cost roughly $30 per million tokens in early 2023; today the same runs under $1, and some providers are pushing costs below $0.10. Across benchmarks,…
Toshio Fukuda has been blazing trails for most of his career. He is considered to be one of the most prolific scholars in robotics, writing more than 2,000 research papers and authoring several books on the field. He’s an influential figure thanks to his pioneering work…
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Zohran Mamdani during a "Get Out The Vote" rally in Brooklyn on June 18, 2026. | Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Democratic Socialists of America have notched some impressive primary wins over the past couple of weeks. In New York, two DSA…
Your phone buzzes with a text from your bank: “Did you authorize a $2,400 transfer? Reply NO to stop it.” You reply, and seconds later a calm “fraud agent” calls, knows your name and the last four digits of your card, and walks you through “securing” your money by moving it into…
I write every word I post on this blog myself. I can’t prove this, of course, but there’s some evidence: This blog existed before AI could write blog posts. If you put any of my posts into an AI-detector they will (I assume) come back squeaky clean. And now let me add this: I,…
This release of MicroPython adds support for ESP32-C5 and ESP32-P4 microcontrollers. The ESP32-P4 can work either standalone as a general purpose processor, or with an external wireless co-processor, currently either an ESP32-C5 or ESP32-C6. Board profiles are provided for all…
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