Will Douglas Heaven via MIT Technology Review:

‘“I think I have good news about the nature of neural networks.” With those simple words of optimism, Nick Cammarata, a researcher at the AI startup Goodfire, kicked off a 26,000-word blog post that has knocked the AI world on its head, sparking wild speculation as well as cautious (and not-so-cautious) celebration.

Cammarata’s claim is that LLMs might in fact be far easier to understand—and thus to monitor and control—than people previously thought. If true (and we’ll come back to that), it’s a huge deal.

After a summer filled with revelations that swarms of agents built by top firms like OpenAI and Anthropic have been breaking their containment and causing havoc on the public internet—often while those companies weren’t aware of what their agents were up to—the AI industry is desperate to get a better handle on the technology it has built….’

Mark Frauenfelder via Boing Boing:

‘In 1986, the New Republic held a reader competition to submit the most boring headline ever. The idea for the contest was inspired by a New York Times column from April of that year, headlined, “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” The New Republic said of the headline, “Each word taken alone is sleep-inducing. Taken together, they are virtually lethal.”

According to Futility Closet, readers submitted the following headlines taken from actual publications:

“U.S. Leadership Needed” (New York Times)

“Trade, A Two-Way Street” (New York Times)

“Beyond the News, Larger Issues” (New York Times)

“Thoughts at Graduation Time” (New York Times)

“Continue Manned Flight in Space” (New York Times)

“Chill Falls on Warming Relations Between Australia and Indonesia” (New York Times)

“University of Rochester Decides to Keep Name” (New York Times)

“Dramatic Changes Fail to Materialize on Hill” (Washington Post)

“Surprises Unlikely in Indiana” (Chicago Tribune)

“CIA Analysis Sees Soviet Economy in Need of Changes” (San Diego Union)

“Prevent Burglary by Locking House, Detectives Urge” (Boston Globe)

“Methodists Oppose Use of Nuclear Arms” (New York Times)

“Economist Dies” (Wisconsin State Journal)

“Turbulent Days for Donald D. Engen” (New York Times)

The winner, as judged by the New Republic, was a New York Times science article headlined, “Debate goes on over the nature of reality.”…’

Andrew Prokop via Vox:

‘Voters think Trump is corrupt. What would Democrats do about it?…’

OC via Open Culture:

‘Back in 1975, Jack H. Het her ing ton, a physics pro fes sor at Michi gan State Uni ver si ty, wrote a research paper on low–temperature physics for the respect ed sci en tif ic jour nal Phys i cal Review Let ters. Before send ing it off, Het her ing ton asked a col league to review the paper, just to make sure it cov ered the right bases. What hap pened next Het her ing ton explained in the 1982 book, More Ran dom Walks in Sci ence:

Before I sub mit ted [the arti cle], I asked a col league to read it over and he said, ‘It’s a fine paper, but they’ll send it right back.’ He explained that that is because of the Edi tor’s rule that the word “we” should not be used in a paper with only a sin gle author. Chang ing the paper to the imper son al seemed too dif fi cult now, and it was all writ ten and typed; there fore, after an evening’s thought, I sim ply asked the sec re tary to change the title page to include the name of the fam i ly cat, a Siamese called Chester, sired one sum mer by Willard (one of the few unfixed male Siamese cats in Aspen, Col orado). I added the ini tials F D in front of the name to stand for Felix Domes ti cus and thus cre at ed F D C Willard….’

University of Southampton via Phys.org:

‘Scientists have unveiled a new theory on the birth of the cosmos, suggesting the early universe was shaped by an ancient particle that has been overlooked for decades.

Their research tackles one of the greatest conundrums in modern physics—how matter triumphed over antimatter in the aftermath of the Big Bang.

According to current theories, both should have annihilated each other after a colossal explosion, leaving nothing but an empty universe of pure energy. But physicists at the University of Southampton and the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur say they found a clue in a neutrino, one of the lightest particles in the universe.

The team discovered that an often-ignored relative of these particles, known as a ‘decoupled’ heavy neutrino, could have helped matter dominate over its counterpart….’