Les Orchard <me@lmorchard.com>

Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial IoT devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes. A replicator like this would be challenging to shut down, since there’s no centralized point to shut off - though it may be slow (with a doubling time of days). Unlike non-AI malware, it could also figure out unfamiliar devices on its own. In our evals, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types we tested.

What the fuck are you doing?

Once he embarked on The Beagle, Darwin's penchant for bold food choices continued to evolve. He ate puma ("remarkably like veal in taste"), iguanas, armadillos. He not only ate giant tortoises, but tried drinking their bladder contents: "The fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste." He ate a 20-pound rodent (usually assumed to be an agouti) that provided "the very best meat I ever tasted." He even accidentally ate part of an ostrich-like bird called a lesser rhea, after spending months trying to catch it so that he could describe the species. (Don't worry: Once he realized what they were dining on, Darwin made everyone stop eating and sent a package of leftover bones, skin and feathers back to England.)

Fun fact: the klattsch app is built on a free, MIT-licensed speech synthesis engine. The klattsch npm package is the engine under the hood, meaning you can drop this voice directly into your own games. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it, complete with examples.

Now, the legal system is starting to show signs that the defense could be on thin ice. Last week, a US appeals court upheld a ruling that AI legal research company Ross Intelligence had broken copyright law by training its legal search engine on materials taken from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research platform and database.

This turned out really well and was a cheap solution to my problems (it cost me about$16 but it currently shows me $21 for a screen). In the weeks since I set it up, it's been so useful for everyone else in the house that I'm considering buying one for the kitchen to control all the living room lights without anyone having to take their phones out, and another one in my barn to turn all the lights on whenever I walk in (currently I always fire up the Apple Home app and run a shortcut to turn on the 6 different light switches).

Over two decades at MIT, Hamilton forged new paths in computer science and engineering. Her groundbreaking work included leading the team that programmed the first computers that took humans to the moon.

Marx's theory of alienation describes the estrangement of people from aspects of their essential human nature as a consequence of living in a society structured by private property and wage labour. Developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx and first articulated in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the theory is a foundational concept of Marxism. At its core, it posits that under the capitalist mode of production, workers are inevitably separated from the products they create, the activity of production, their fellow human beings, and their own creative potential.

Because RSS is now a common surface for large-scale scraping and automated abuse, we'll stop supporting RSS feeds on November 13, 2026 while preserving moderation workflows that depend on it through supported alternatives.

Well, this sucks ass.

A drop-in replacement mechanical keyboard for the Atari 400's membrane, that respects the unique design of the computer