GoKawiil
Tech News
Anthropic has disclosed that one of its AI models was linked to a fourth instance of likely criminal misuse, continuing a pattern of disclosures about how its systems can be exploited for harmful purposes. Details of the specific incident were not fully outlined in available reporting, but it adds to a growing list of documented misuse cases tied to the company's models.
While formalizing Dummit and Foote's algebra textbook in the Rocq proof assistant, a Recurse Center participant found that the book's first proof exercise—claiming a function is injective if and only if it has a left inverse—fails when the domain is empty and the codomain is not. In that case the empty function is vacuously injective but has no left inverse, since no function can map from a nonempty codomain to an empty domain. The author later confirmed the issue is already listed in the book's published errata.
Researchers at UCLA's RePL lab are developing Prela, a query language that replaces SQL's multi-column tables with simple binary relations of just two columns. A tutorial shows how a wide table, such as one listing movie IDs, titles and years, can be broken into three binary relations, each pairing a row number with a single column's value, and demonstrates a movie-search query that takes 11 lines in Prela versus more than 20 in equivalent SQL.
Mathematical physicist John Baez has published a new paper arguing that the puzzling existence of exactly three generations of quarks and leptons may emerge naturally from the exceptional Lie group E7, building on earlier work linking the Standard Model's gauge group to the exceptional Jordan algebra. The paper is his third in a series exploring whether unusual mathematical structures built from the octonions can explain quirky features of particle physics rather than treating them as accidental.