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Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book

In recent years, numerous plaintiffs—including publishers of books, newspapers, computer code, and photographs—have sued AI companies for training models using copyrighted material. A key question in all of these lawsuits has been how easily AI models produce verbatim excerpts from the plaintiffs’ copyrighted content. For example, in its December 2023 lawsuit against OpenAI, the New York Times Company produced dozens of examples where GPT-4 exactly reproduced significant passages from Times sto

Nanonets-OCR-s – OCR model transforms documents into structured markdown

Nanonets-OCR-s is a powerful, state-of-the-art image-to-markdown OCR model that goes far beyond traditional text extraction. It transforms documents into structured markdown with intelligent content recognition and semantic tagging, making it ideal for downstream processing by Large Language Models (LLMs). Nanonets-OCR-s is packed with features designed to handle complex documents with ease: LaTeX Equation Recognition: Automatically converts mathematical equations and formulas into properly fo

Chemical knowledge and reasoning of large language models vs. chemist expertise

Benchmark corpus To compile our benchmark corpus, we utilized a broad list of sources (Methods), ranging from completely novel, manually crafted questions over university exams to semi-automatically generated questions based on curated subsets of data in chemical databases. For quality assurance, all questions have been reviewed by at least two scientists in addition to the original curator and automated checks. Importantly, our large pool of questions encompasses a wide range of topics and que

Is Gravity Just Entropy Rising? Long-Shot Idea Gets Another Look

Isaac Newton was never entirely happy with his law of universal gravitation. For decades after publishing it in 1687, he sought to understand how, exactly, two objects were able to pull on each other from afar. He and others came up with several mechanical models, in which gravity was not a pull, but a push. For example, space might be filled with unseen particles that bombard the objects on all sides. The object on the left absorbs the particles coming from the left, the one on the right absorb

Lisp-stat: Lisp environment for statistical computing

Lisp-Stat is conceptually similar to R and will be familiar to most people from that ecosystem. It is suitable for both exploratory data analysis as well as front-line production deployments. Common Lisp is currently used at Google in several high-availability, high-volume transactional systems. Why Lisp? We had a few requirements when evaluating options. Specifically the system had to: Work well in the kind of exploratory environment conducive to analytics and AI Be robust enough to work in

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 16, #266

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition might be tough. Green was a nice easy one, but I was lost on some of the others. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a sign that the game has earned enough

ChatGPT's AI coder Codex now lets you choose the best solution

ChatGPT's Codex, which is an AI agent that lets you code and delegate programming tasks, is now testing a new feature that lets you choose the best solution. OpenAI launched Codex in April, and it's a great tool, but it's nowhere close to replacing entry-level engineers. OpenAI insists Codex could help developers achieve more by delegating their tasks to different agents, and a new update brings it closer to the expectations set by the company. As per the release notes, ChatGPT Codex can now

SQLite Date and Time Functions (2007)

The document describes default date and time functions in SQLite. This document is a supplement to the function documentation found on the SQL Expression Syntax page. Function Overview Five date and time functions are available, as follows: date( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) time( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) datetime( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) julianday( timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) strftime( format, timestring, modifier, modifier, ...) All five functions

Topics: date day mm modifier time

Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for June 16, #470

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles. Today's NYT Strands puzzle will hit all the right notes with musicians. If you need hints and answers, read on. I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. If you're looking for today's Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET's NYT

Jensen Huang hits back at Anthropic CEO's warning that AI will eliminate half of white-collar jobs

What just happened? Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent warning that AI could wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years has been disputed by Nvidia boss Jensen Huang. It's not the first time the two companies have clashed, and Anthropic has hit back with claims that Huang is putting words into Amodei's mouth. Amodei made his ominous prediction about AI's impact on entry-level, white-collar jobs in May, warning that the eradication of these positions will le

Do reasoning AI models really ‘think’ or not? Apple research sparks lively debate, response

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more Apple’s machine-learning group set off a rhetorical firestorm earlier this month with its release of “The Illusion of Thinking,” a 53-page research paper arguing that so-called large reasoning models (LRMs) or reasoning large language models (reasoning LLMs) such as OpenAI’s “o” series and Google’s Gemini-2.5 Pro and Flash Thinking don’t a

I turned my Pixel 9 into a desktop PC and it actually works great

Android 16 is finally here, but unfortunately, some of the best features are still on the horizon. One upcoming tool that I’ve been keeping a particularly close eye on is Android 16’s Desktop Mode, currently available in the QPR1 Beta 2. It’s been a while since I gave Samsung’s equivalent Dex setup a go, so I’m very keen to see what’s different, what’s new, and how far things have come. Eager to try it out, I grabbed my Pixel 9 Pro XL, installed the latest beta, and decided to try working on my

Tiny-diffusion: A minimal implementation of probabilistic diffusion models

A minimal PyTorch implementation of probabilistic diffusion models for 2D datasets. Get started by running python ddpm.py -h to explore the available options for training. Forward process A visualization of the forward diffusion process being applied to a dataset of one thousand 2D points. Note that the dinosaur is not a single training example, it represents each 2D point in the dataset. Reverse process This illustration shows how the reverse process recovers the distribution of the trainin

Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable

Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable Before the 1970s, most children affected by leukemia would quickly die from it. Now, most children in rich countries are cured. In the past, when I’d hear the words childhood leukemia, I’d picture a young child who suddenly became seriously ill, and whose parents were told their child had only a few years to live. I’d wonder how a child might grasp the idea of limited time, or how painful it must have been to face the possibility of miss

The 14 Best TVs We’ve Reviewed, Plus Buying Advice (2025)

Saving up for a new screen? Whether you’re a videophile or new to 4K, the best TVs you can buy are bigger, brighter, and cheaper than ever. To help you navigate the dozens of models from LG, Samsung, TCL, Hisense, Sony, Panasonic, and others, we've done intensive testing and watched hundreds of hours of content to grab the standouts from our recent reviews. Below you'll find everything from the best OLED TVs we've ever tested to the best cheap TVs for tight budgets—with plenty of excellent optio

Topics: 4k best models tvs ve

Have a damaged painting? Restore it in just hours with an AI-generated “mask”

The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting. Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, Alex

Meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity

A meta-analysis of three different notions of software complexity I want to discuss three different notions of software complexity: Rich Hickey’s notion of complexity, as explained in his talk Simple Made Easy. John Ousterhout’s notion of complexity, as explained in his book A Philosophy of Software Design. Zach Tellman’s notion of complexity, as explained in his newsletter Explaining Software Design. I’ve picked these three because I’ve found them to be at least somewhat coherent, and the

The Algebra of an Infinite Grid of Resistors

The Algebra of an Infinite Grid of Resistors In a previous note we discussed the well-known problem of determining the resistance between two nodes of an “infinite” square lattice of resistors. The most common approach is to superimpose two “monopole” solutions, one representing the field for one amp of current entering a given node and flowing “to infinity”, and the other representing the field for one amp of current being withdrawn from a given node flowing in from infinity. If the two nodes

These are the best iPad deals right now, just in case iPadOS 26 made you rethink things

A short while ago, I was browsing Apple deals on Amazon (as one does) – and something stuck out to me. High-end iPad Pros, particularly 12.9-inch models, are surprisingly cheap. I saw M1 models with 1TB and cellular for under $700. Given the recent iPadOS 26 overhaul that makes the iPad much more Mac-like, I figured these deals would be worth a share. While renewed iPad deals are the focus here because of their affordability, new iPad deals are also mentioned at the end. Renewed M1 iPad Pro de

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ third season falls short of its second

This is a spoiler-free preview of the first five episodes of season three. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ended its second season with arguably the single strongest run of any streaming-era Trek. The show was made with such confidence in all departments that if there were flaws, you weren’t interested in looking for them. Since then, it’s gone from being the best modern Trek, to being the only modern Trek. Unfortunately, at the moment it needs to be the standard bearer for the show, it’s become

Have a damaged painting? Restore it in just hours with an AI-generated "mask"

The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting. Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, Alex

McDonald's in Trouble as Ozempic Takes Hold

Image by Getty / Futurism Rx/Medicines Broken ice cream machines aren't the only thing bedeviling stalwart fast food chain McDonald's. Financial services firm Redburn Atlantic put the company's stock in the bear category, coinciding with a slumpy week in which it lost about three percent of its value — because analysts are betting that GLP-1 agonist weight loss drugs like Ozempic are going to disrupt the fast food business model, CBS News reports. The eyebrow-raising conclusion comes as the a

Rethinking AI: DeepSeek’s playbook shakes up the high-spend, high-compute paradigm

Join the event trusted by enterprise leaders for nearly two decades. VB Transform brings together the people building real enterprise AI strategy. Learn more When DeepSeek released its R1 model this January, it wasn’t just another AI announcement. It was a watershed moment that sent shockwaves through the tech industry, forcing industry leaders to reconsider their fundamental approaches to AI development. What makes DeepSeek’s accomplishment remarkable isn’t that the company developed novel ca

How the Final Cartridge III Freezer Works

by Daniël Mantione Daniël contributed the commented disassembly of the FC3 freezer functionality to the reverse engineering effort at github.com/mist64/final_cartridge. Thanks to Eric Schlaepfer for his input on 6502 timing. Freezer cartridge theory One key reason why the Commodore 64 was so successful in the 80s was that it was able to do things it wasn’t designed for. Freezer cartridges, which allowed stopping any running program or game, applying cheat codes and resuming, or saving the com

We investigated Amsterdam's attempt to build a 'fair' fraud detection model

METHODOLOGY How we investigated Amsterdam’s attempt to build a ‘fair’ fraud detection model For the past four years, Lighthouse has investigated welfare fraud detection algorithms deployed in five European countries. Our investigations have found evidence that these systems discriminated against vulnerable groups with oftentimes steep consequences for people’s lives. Governments and companies deploying these systems often show little regard for the biases they perpetrate against vulnerable gro

Seven replies to the viral Apple reasoning paper and why they fall short

The Apple paper on limitations in the “reasoning” of Large Reasoning Models, which raised challenges for the latest scaling hypothesis, has clearly touched a nerve. Tons of media outlets covered it; huge numbers of people on social media are discussing. My own post here laying out the Apple paper in historical and scientific context was so popular that well over 150,000 people read it, biggest in this newsletter’s history. The Guardian published an adaptation of my post (“When billion-dollar AI

Infinite Grid of Resistors

Infinite Grid of Resistors Remain, remain thou here, While sense can keep it on. And, sweetest, fairest, As I my poor self did exchange for you, To your so infinite loss, so in our trifles I still win of you: for my sake wear this... Shakespeare There is a well-known puzzle based on the premise of an “infinite” grid of resistors connecting adjacent nodes of a square lattice. A small portion of such a grid is illustrated below. Between every pair of adjacent nodes is a resistance R, and w

Today's NYT Connections Hints, Answers and Help for June 15, #735

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's NYT Connections puzzle has one mention of Father's Day to mark the holiday. It's not super tough -- maybe race Dad to see who can complete it fastest. Read on for clues and today's Connections answers. The Times now has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle.

Today's NYT Strands Hints, Answers and Help for June 15, #469

Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles. Today's NYT Strands puzzle celebrates Father's Day, but in kind of an oddball way. If you need hints and answers, read on. I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. If you're looking for today's Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit

Today's NYT Connections: Sports Edition Hints and Answers for June 15, #265

Looking for the most recent regular Connections answers? Click here for today's Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle and Strands puzzles. Today's Connections: Sports Edition might be tough. Read on for hints and the answers. Connections: Sports Edition is out of beta now, making its debut on Super Bowl Sunday, Feb. 9. That's a sign that the game has earned enough loyal players that The Athletic, the subscription-based sports jo