just_human

Interesting new time series forecasting model from google research that can adapt using examples at inference time (like providing examples in the context prompt for an llm).

TL;DR: Protesters are conducting hunger strikes outside Anthropic (San Francisco) and Google DeepMind (London) offices to demand these companies stop racing toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

This seems like a premature reaction. The Trump administration has been known to anchor to extreme positions as a negotiation tactic.

Given the complexity of forced platform migrations (user data transfer, algorithm preservation, creator monetization continuity), and the technical/legal hurdles involved, I suspect we're seeing opening moves in a broader negotiation rather than a final outcome.

Let's all be patient and wait to see how this plays out before assuming users will actually have to migrate to a completely new app with new ownership.

tl;dr: Recent research shows animal communication is more sophisticated than previously thought. Bonobos combine calls in multiple ways to create complex phrases with non-trivial compositionality (like human idioms). Sperm whales have their own "phonetic alphabet" with vowel-like patterns and diphthong-like frequency changes. Japanese tits and chimps show compositional communication.

AI tools from projects like Earth Species Project and CETI are helping decode these patterns and may eventually enable two-way communication with animals. While some uniquely human language features (displacement, productivity, recursion) haven't been conclusively found in animals yet, the gap between human and animal communication appears to be narrowing.

Key finding: Animals can create meanings that can't be determined from individual calls alone - similar to human idioms.

Lots of interesting history here, but most relevant was that regulatory and process changes starting in the 80's made it increasingly expensive to build reactors. As a result, reactor construction companies (notably Westinghouse) went bankrupt and no entity was willing to take financial risk to build new reactors. Western Europe is a different story, where political parties aggressively shutdown healthy nuclear plants and passed laws preventing new nuclear.

Much of this regulation and process overhead is now being rolled back in the US (by both political parties) and Europe is slowly coming around to allowing new nuclear. NuScale is one of many next gen companies (I hope they're all successful), but the traditional large reactors are also great and can be built cost effectively.