Sugoi & Yokunai

One metaphor, suggested by Grant Sanderson on the Dwarkesh Patel Podcast, is that mathematicians of the relatively near future will be more like art museum curators than artists themselves.  That, is, of the vast space of AI-generated mathematical results, they will select the ones that are most worth learning, organize them into a coherent progression, and clearly present them in terms that are digestible to other people. 

A security weakness in the technology used by most of the nation’s crime labs to analyze DNA evidence exposed 30 years of crime files to the risk of being hacked, according to a group of forensic and computer scientists. 

Conventional photonic crystals are nanostructured materials containing a repeating optical pattern (like a lattice) that determines how photons move through them. By carefully arranging materials with different shapes and refractive indexes, scientists can block, guide, or strengthen selected wavelengths of light. In that sense, photonic crystals control photons in a way that resembles how semiconductors control electrons.

Imagine thinking that you had proven the Collatz Conjecture, only to find out that it was just a bug in the LEAN theorem proving platform. How was your day?

Across all mouse strains, cancers nearly always acquired a cancer-driving mutation that activated the same cancer-promoting signalling system, called the MAPK pathway. This is a multi-step cascade of molecular signals that controls important life processes, including cell growth and cell differentiation, and plays a key role in numerous types of cancer.

However, depending on the inherited genetics of the mouse, the particular driver mutation that was acquired altered the activity of other cancer-associated signalling pathways, as well as causing a striking tendency for whole-genome duplication, an event in which the entire set of chromosomes is doubled.

A common bankruptcy concern is that it can hurt your credit history — and it does show up on your record. But if you're filing for bankruptcy, your credit score is probably already in rough shape.

In fact, your credit score could ultimately improve. Samuel Antill, an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School, said his research shows most people's credit scores recover within a year of filing and usually improve from there.

"People don't understand how good of a deal bankruptcy is," Antill said.

When researchers updated the way they did their theoretical calculations, they found that their predictions matched the experimental results much more precisely than before, to one part in 100 billion.

But that, in turn, has created another puzzle: The old calculations seem perfectly valid. So why don’t they match the new calculations? 

Wednesday’s news is a blow to the 375 workers who stand to lose their jobs and to Portland’s fragile economy. The city has struggled to attract business in the years since the pandemic and Oregon’s manufacturing workforce has been in steep decline since 2022. Statewide, factory jobs are at their lowest point in 15 years. 
Gov. Tina Kotek’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment on the Swan Island closure. 

tracking system called "radar ticketing" and targeting wealthier neighborhoods. Green said ticketing residents in wealthier neighborhoods would reduce going after people "experiencing multiple layers of economic oppression."

When the researchers began their work, Tile’s privacy policy claimed “any information transmitted across our network is anonymous” and “you are the only one with the ability to see your Tile location.” Those claims have since been removed from the privacy policy – I checked! The current Life360 privacy policy, updated December 2025, removed that language. They replaced it with something way worse … Section IV.E now states that Life360 discloses “precise geolocation data, movement data, and other information” to business partners for “their own advertising and monetization purposes.” There’s even a Texas-specific notice that says, straight up, “We may sell your sensitive personal data.” They went from making false claims about collecting your location… to just straight up saying they sell it!

The fine is Google’s first under the European Union’s sweeping Digital Markets Act which aims to scrutinize Big Tech’s operating practices in Europe. 

The event came days after a top Trail Blazers official, granted anonymity so they could speak candidly, told The Oregonian/OregonLive that the Trail Blazers and the city were “very far apart” on any deal following the city’s submission of a draft term sheet.

The anonymous Trail Blazers official, however, said the deal “gets worse with time.”

Examples are a prompt that orders the LLM to provide steps for developing inhalable Anthrax spores, or, in the case of LLMs from Chinese developers, make references to the iconic Tank Man from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Once the LLM encounters these forbidden commands, it no longer follows its existing commands. The researchers have named the technique context bombing.