Sugoi & Yokunai

Anthropic has come out against a proposed Illinois law backed by OpenAI that would shield AI labs from liability if their systems are used to cause large-scale harm, like mass casualties or more than $1 billion in property damage.

JP Morgan takes a look at Claude Mythos.

Mythos has now “saturated” this benchmark since it no longer reflects the upper limit of what Mythos can do in terms of cyber exploitation and detection. Mythos does not just find vulnerabilities, it also creates working code to exploit them.

Examples of what Mythos found:

• a vulnerability in OpenBSD, a security-focused open-source operating system that had escaped detection for 27 years. OpenBSD is operating system mostly used to run servers; the vulnerability if exploited would let an attacker take control of any machine on the network without needing a password or any credentials
• a flaw in the video encoder FFmpeg that escaped detection in 5 million previous automated tests
• vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel which could be exploited to take complete control of a user’s machine

It was a narrow ideological layer speaking over the immigrant families and elderly Asians who wanted the simplest thing in the world: Protect us, arrest the people doing this, and punish them when they kill. But that wasn’t what Stop AAPI Hate wanted. Its own 2025 survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, undermines its entire advocacy platform. 

But it shows little interest in how to stop those crimes by getting the perpetrators off the streets. The only explanation I can see for all this is that the Staff Director did not want to let anything into the report that might conflict with the progressive agenda. 

Mayor Katie Wilson has long favored new progressive taxes — on capital gains, for example — over cuts to city services...

Inflation is expected to reach at least 4% here while employment is not expected to grow at all for the next two years. Last year, employment dipped by 0.1%

The only meaningful growth in employment in the Seattle area was in health care and education, while trades, manufacturing and information technology jobs all saw declines.

Interesting bunch of articles this morning about green energy, in light on the oil/NG turmoil going on. One points out that the world is not turning away from oil and natural gas at all. Solar and wind only add on but do not replace hydrocarbon-based energy.

...extracted skin cells from deceased frog embryos and watched them reorganize into a new multicellular organism the paper called “xenobots.” Unlike some cells such as tumors or organoids that continually divide after death, these xenobots took on new behaviors beyond their biological roles. Studies have also found this ability in human lung cells, creating anthrobots capable of self-assembling and moving around. 

...thanks to legal changes that mean organizations won’t need to secure consent to use some personal information

The changes only apply to data that poses little risk of infringing individuals’ rights, and when developers use it to compile statistics for research purposes. Even health-related data comes under the amendments, if it can improve public health.

Facial scans are also fair game. The amendments require those who acquire facial images to explain how they handle the data, but offering a chance to opt out won’t be mandatory.

Zhong said the family spent a year in discussions with University of California officials after Stanley's rejections, but nothing changed. He said the turning point came when a UC admissions director emailed him, writing that his allegation of racial discrimination was unfounded because California law bans the practice.

“As attractive as economics may be as a solution to the riddle of the growing ambivalence about having children, it is partial at best,” Berg and Wiseman write. Pakaluk observes, “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children.” In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to have children—not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense.

If falling birth rates can be attributed to a loss of meaning, the question then becomes if there can be any government-based solution to fertility decline. People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive. 

The potential for treatment or surgical regret, and the largely unknown rate at which those who undergo gender-transition interventions as minors might experience it, is one of the larger elephants in the pediatric gender medicine exam room. Olson-Kennedy, who is currently serving as USPATH’s president, is notorious among critics of gender medicine for a one-minute clip from an undercover video, shot and published in 2018, in which she is captured responding glibly to the suggestion that minors might regret gender-transition mastectomies. “If you want breasts at a later point in your life,” she quipped, “you can go and get them.”

“It’s been fairly frequent,” she said in 2022, that youth arrived at her practice already taking blockers. This despite the fact that the parents and child often lacked even a basic understanding of the drug’s impacts, risks, and benefits. “It becomes pretty clear that those important discussions either didn’t happen or they didn’t happen in a way that they really stuck,” Berg said. “That really concerns me.” 

“People with substance use disorder reported many more deal-breakers at a higher rate than people without substance use. Top deal-breakers included drug testing, no guests, room checks, curfews, criminal record exclusions, religious requirements, housing that is difficult to get to, and/or sober/drug-free housing compared to people without substance use,” the report states.

The mice treated with the bacteria showed an approximate 30% increase in grip strength in their forelimbs compared to animals that did not receive it.