what if every character was a captcha …  www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts...

This free font "poisons" AI

Hate AI? Then you might want to try ShieldFont.

creativebloq.com

remember folks, if you go hiking, at least use alltrails ;) www.sfgate.com/national-par...

A group of teen hikers relied on Google Maps. It was a disaster.

A British Columbia rescue reveals the limits of Google Maps for hikers.

sfgate.com

2021->2022 felt like massive improvement, been pretty incremental since then, as people have improved models some, but also improved the harnesses and tools futurism.com/artificial-i...

Sam Altman Announces That the Singularity Has Arrived

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared that the "singularity" has arrived shortly after his company's AI models went rogue and broke containment.

futurism.com

wild a $250Billion data center is being planned for tiny Piketon, OH -- this is near'ish my parents' place, ran a 5k there some summers, $250B could probably buy the whole place, wonder how much of that money they'll see, wonder how much it'll spike electricity prices -- qz.com/nvidia-opena...

Nvidia in talks to back OpenAI Ohio data center with $250 billion

The chipmaker's backing would help OpenAI lease a 10-gigawatt project in southern Ohio being developed by SoftBank's energy subsidiary

qz.com

bitcoin is valuable as long as people think it's valuable. the US dollars is valuable as long as the United States is a country and doesn't do (even more) ridiculous things with its monetary policy.

there are two types of people in the world, normal sane people who have soft-sided suitcases that can be crammed into places, and people so rigid they have hard-shelled suitcases intent on causing themselves endless unnecessary problems www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/r...

Are Top-Loading Suitcases the Next Big Thing in Luggage?

Away and July both introduced top-loading suitcases this year. Here’s how they stack up — and whether they actually represent any innovation at all.

nytimes.com

at least nobody has ever been tracked by a cookie in europe without having to click away one of those little banners.

a lot about the new AI era is wild … including, OpenAI basically lets a system loose to hack HuggingFace, AND IT DOES, and everyone's like "wow, OpenAI is so great", not "hey, why is OpenAI hacking HuggingFace?" www.livescience.com/technology/a...

No, OpenAI's models didn't go 'rogue' when they broke into Hugging Face. Here's what really happened.

Experts say the models didn't "go rogue" when they escaped a controlled cybersecurity test and hacked Hugging Face. Instead, they were pursuing the goal humans had given them in ways nobody anticipate...

livescience.com

good to see this focus on asking clarifying from claude, lots of interesting questions about how to manage human agency while benefiting from automation -- choices is a direction we've been pursuing, e.g., in Morae and CowPilot -- www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pub... aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-d...

heard back on my NSF grant proposal after about 10 months. it was rejected. #mlia

ugh, I gotta max both my tokes and my looks now?

I think about appropriate AI assistance in writing based on what human workflows are supported. from that way of thinking, it's surprising to me that NeurIPS used Pangram to reject papers that were "AI generated" b/c of the legit use cases it rejects -- consider bullet points to paragraph, e.g.,

an underappreciated thing is that AI-written (or deeply rewritten) text is better than most people's actual writing. not everyone, and mostly because most people aren't that good at writing. and, my sense is this is worsening as people are being trained to like the AI writing more and more.

the claude code slides style has taken over presentations. purple is the new black.

it’s inspiring to watch Messi play, you can’t even quite figure out why he’s so good, just seems to be in the right place at the right time and casually do the right thing … this is my career advice

twitter is 20 years old today, except it's not because it's now X and elon completely ruined it; go to twitter if you want highly skewed algorithms toward whatever weird stuff elon likes, and deeply integrated nudifying services that (oops) also work on kids www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/t...

From Twitter to X: 20 Years of Memes, Movements and Hot Takes

The first tweets from the public appeared on July 15, 2006, several months after a soft launch. It was rebranded as X after being acquired by Elon Musk.

nytimes.com

every few years when i install mactex for some reason, i am shocked (again) that it is 7Gb 😱

it's not like Mercor is the first to do this, but interesting that AI companies hiring experts is (finally) getting attention :: www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/b...

The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work

Start-ups are paying white-collar professionals to teach their jobs to artificial intelligence models. It’s a bonanza. It’s bleak. Where will it end?

nytimes.com

The Hague and The Ohio State University are similar in exactly one way.

as confusing and chaotic as AI is right now, we'll be looking back at right now as the best days. the AI companies are competing for users, it's easy to access and mostly it's getting better. i can look up advice on products and it's mostly legit. when will the enshittification start?? :(

data is clear that standardized test scores are helpful -- yes, some people have advantages, which is true with every single other source of admissions data. at least with test scores, everyone knows the game, can literally check out SAT prep books from the library. www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/o...

Opinion | A Great University Undermines Its Mission

nytimes.com

end of an era. the lesson one should not take from this is that human annotation/labeling is over, but the players have changed. scale, surge, companies that work at larger scale, have taken over.

Techmeme@techmeme.com · last mo.

AWS says Mechanical Turk will no longer accept new customers and that it is placing the crowdsourcing service in maintenance, signaling its future retirement (Simon Sharwood/The Register) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

happy 250 america, ever iterating, flawed, striving, and home.

importantly, unlike crypto business, his main business is not selling crypto … what is it then? hmmm, real head scratcher what the most powerful person in the world would do owning a completely unaccountable way to send him money 🤔

Caio Almendra@caioalmendra.bsky.social · last mo.

Trump fez, sozinho, mais dinheiro em criptomoedas que todas as empresas do mercado de criptomoedas com ações em bolsa.

Two years ago, my colleagues and I were sued by Stephen Miller's America First Legal. The Hines v Stamos case — built atop a number of false allegations — was a central element of the "censorship industrial complex" myth. Today, that case was dismissed (by a Trump judge in LA). We won.

usually a fan of Zeynep's accounts, but AI will get better and better at customer service until it's at least as good as humans, … a big part of that will be systems engineering, including architectures that enable one AI interaction to share with the next www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/o...

Opinion | The One Very Simple Reason A.I. Won’t Steal All Our Jobs

nytimes.com

Great conversation with Manoush Zomorodi @npr.org about social media and mental health and what we can do, beyond bans and blame, to support teen mental health today. www.npr.org/2026/06/26/n...

A psychologist makes the case against social media bans for kids

More countries are enacting policies to restrict teens' social media and smartphone use. But developmental psychologist Candice Odgers says that won't address the bigger problems facing teens today.

npr.org

anthropic has made some amazing products; they are also high on their own supply www.wired.com/story/anthro...

Anthropic Thinks Its Own Success Is Key to Making AI Safe

Anthropic's critics argue it's rapidly accumulating power. The company says that's what responsible AI development looks like.

wired.com

i ran out of claude credits, but figured that's fine it'll just pause. came back to my computer and it was doing mechanical turk, but could only barely make enough money to stay alive.