Matt Alldian

Each month, the BPP tracks millions of prices, with sources spanning e-commerce sites, credit- and debit-card transactions, retail food surveys, regulatory filings, pharmacy transactions and corporate datasets. The goal is to measure prices in a way that is as close as possible to the approach used by BLS, but adapted to alternative sources.

We construct price indexes at a deeper level of granularity than the CPI, breaking them down by criteria like product, geography and brand.

The Bloomberg Price Project rebuilds the US CPI from millions of prices at almost 700 line items via x.com

Almost half (44%) of our tested claims are now expired in today’s models. Another 34% have weakened significantly, 16% persist, and 6% have strengthened relative to the original claim. Persistence varies by topic. Five of nine reasoning claims and six of eleven sycophancy-and-deception claims are classified as expired. Three of ten claims about models as judges, reviewers, and raters persist or strengthen.

Stanford researchers retest 50 widely cited LLM findings - most fade within 15 months via x.com

Cusack succeeds in delighting his readers with Momo, too, but only if traditional definition of “delight” is expanded to include hard-earned enlightenment. The story piles on enough facts, half-facts, and non-facts to create cognitive dissonance, which only then leads to something delightful: the moment when the reader asks where the truth is. Or more precisely, how much they’re being lied to.

Evan Brown on John Cusack's disorienting graphic novel Momo via x.com

LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is).

And it had to learn far more than language. Accents, pauses, breathing, sarcasm, humor, inflection, emotion, when to cut in: every one changes what someone means. Say “I didn’t say she stole my CUDA code” out loud, stressing a different word each time. Same words, different meaning every time.

Dessa is Block's speech-to-speech model, trained on human conversation alone - no text, no pretrained models via x.com

Second, AI can now break in on its own. No skilled hacker required. One person gave AI agents instructions shorter than a tweet, fewer than 100 Chinese characters, and let them work largely on their own. They broke into websites belonging to more than 100 companies, including John Deere, at an estimated $50 per break-in. They don’t sleep or get bored. They just keep trying until they find a way in.

Matt Shumer on the AI hacking wave, written for people outside tech to forward to their families.

One might ask if at some point pure mathematics will somehow be “finished”. And to this we can definitively answer that it will not. Computational irreducibility ensures that there will always be an infinite sequence of mathematical facts—and surprises—to be discovered. And there will also be an infinite number of pockets of computational reducibility, representing new mathematical concepts and structures.

Many beautiful thoughts here in Stephen Wolfram's latest essay on AI's role in pure mathematics.

RSI-Inference Bench is a long-horizon benchmark for coding agents that improve the inference stack of large language models. It follows a model through its life in a production engine, vLLM or SGLang: supported on day 0, optimized after launch, and repaired when a regression lands. An agent works on the real engine, on real GPUs, and is graded by running what it built.

Apple's RSI-Inference Bench scores coding agents on 37 real vLLM and SGLang inference tasks via x.com

Terence Tao on the crisis caused by a massive dump of AI proofs via x.com

REA lets coding agents reverse engineer any app, from its behavior down to native binaries via x.com

Reelizer is Roger Erik Tinch's collection of movie posters, prints, album art, and book covers, curated since 2011 via kottke.org

“I remember chatting with a doctor who said, unless you strapped the helmet to a player’s shoulders so that your head couldn’t move around on your neck, the helmet really can’t do all that much to prevent a concussion,” says Kathleen Bachynski , an associate professor of public health at Muhlenberg College. “I do think you can tweak design around the edges, but I think you’re up against the law of physics.”

99% Invisible on football helmets, from 1939 leather mandates to the Guardian Cap.

Almost nobody realizes Japan's main islands can be crossed on foot, at the midpoint of 780 meters of tiled corridor a painted line marks the boundary between Yamaguchi and Fukuoka prefectures.

The Shimonoseki entrance opens onto Mimosusogawa Park, overlooking the water where the Taira clan was annihilated at Dan-no-ura in 1185, which means the whole fifteen-minute walk passes under one of the most consequential battles in Japanese history.

Kanmon Pedestrian Tunnel connects Honshu and Kyushu through 780 meters of tiled undersea corridor.