However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.

> The Pentagon chief last year slashed offices that didn’t contribute to his goal of “lethality,” including the group that assists in limiting risk to civilians, known as the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence. Around 200 employees who worked on the issue, including at that office, have been reduced by about 90 percent, according to two current and former officials and a person familiar with the effort. The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.

Negligent homicide in pursuit of their DEI goals, basically.

Reading the details, "AI" doesn't really seem like the culprit -it's a scapegoat.

The intelligence that it was no longer a military target never entered the target database, the team that was responsible for vetting the target list was gutted, and said team was never even consulted.

The White House wanted 1000 targets and pulled from their database without any due diligence. Whether it was an AI call or an SQL query - this was from pure human maliciousness and incompetence.

I cannot believe this has come to pass.

There is no legitimate reason to impose age verification on users in jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.

It is a risk to the privacy and safety of all users on the platform - it provides an easier way for pedophiles to identify underage users and provides more doxable information.

Discord has no business making this decision on behalf of jurisdictions that do not legally mandate it.

Of course there is. For example, SeL4’s security and reliability proofs still hold in the world of LLMs. The problem is that most software isn’t written on that firm foundation. Instead, most software is made by people with the philosophy of “if it looks like it works, ship it”. You don’t get secure software by working like that, because security vulnerabilities aren’t visible.

We - humans - know how to write secure software. Just like we know how to make safe aeroplanes. The problem isn’t that we lack the capability to make secure computers. The problem is we don’t have a culture of security. Secure software is - somehow - niche. And as such, it’s much more expensive. And nobody wants to pay.

For example, do not hook your goddamn water or traffic or electricity infrastructure up to the goddamn Internet, and then, do fire the guy who suggested it.

The correct analogy for computer security is not locks and keys and doors and gates. It is a house in a floodplain. Your house will not survive the flood of it hits you. Do not store anything critical or irreplaceable in that house.

In the pilot, the Galactica was literally being turned into a museum, and that's why they lived.

China hacked 22.1 million records of US government employees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Office_of_Personnel_Manag...

Perhaps firing expertise and hiring incompetents wasn't a good idea.

Not a skin-scientist, but this seems misleading: Sunburn is not caused by some bad DNA floating around, nor damaged cells making making mistakes or pumping out wrong proteins to inflame their neighbors.

Instead, your cells have techniques to measure a variety of risk factors and signals (which does include DNA-molecule weirdness [0]) and when things get too risky the well-behaved ones will self-destruct, to avoid the chance of turning into a cancer.

So the sunburn you see and feel is instead due to cells signalling "something damaged me and I can't be trusted, I'm shutting down, recycle me" to your immune-system, plus the attendant bustle of hazmat-cleanup and increased security-sweeps for cancer-leftovers and other potential causes of the damage.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/newbio241074a0

- For general chat and web search, occasional image editing, small coding work, document review etc. ChatGPT Plus is basically limitless and “just works” since 5.6. I’ve yet to give it some task it cannot do.

- When given sensible instructions, it hardly annoys with weird phrasing, glazing, or annoying constructs.

- The apps are very good (ignoring the initially terrible Codex app)

It’s easily my best spent $23 a month.

Cached Read: ~6,500M

Input: ~150M

Output: ~20M

Approx $40 worth of usage across DeepSeek V4 Flash + MuseSpark Contributor 1.3. And a bit of both the GLM models. This is covered in a $10 subscription.

If I were to use Luna's API pricing:

$0.02 x 6,500 = $130

$0.20 x 150 = $30

$1.20 x 20 = $24

So $184. And this is assuming smaller coding sessions (<272K) beyond which Luna pricing doubles.

--

Cost wise, these models are nice for small stuff. Translations etc. Any model that does not provide multiple Mtoks of cached reads per cent is not very useful to me for coding workflows.

    I dont know how they make money here

Snark aside, Luna 5.6 was (is) an incredible game-changer.

Here's GPT-6 Luna pelicans: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

And GPT-6 Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Scroll to the bottom for the GPT-6 Sol max one: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

For comparison, here are the pelicans I got for GPT-6 Astra: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... - I still like the Astra Max one best.

Here's a comparison grid showing all of the GPT-6 and GPT-5.6 pelicans at all effort levels: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-6-and-5.6.h...

The grid is actually really interesting, because it shows that the 5.6 family default to brighter colors than the 6 family.

1/ Usage limits: downstream of input/output cost, but resets and obscure windows and odd 20x plan / 5x plan != 4x usage math throw a wrench into it. Winner right now is Codex by a mile, especially when you factor in the fact that ChatGPT usage (even 6 Astra Pro) is essentially unmetered on the 20x plan. Always a bummer when asking if I should see a doctor about a rash means I can't code as much. It's also is a godsend if you use an MCP like oracle to automate the process of calling the Pro model on particularly tough problems, giving better planning results or deeper code analysis without burning usage.

2/ Context window in the harness. Claude Code wins on this. There used to be a toml file workaround for Codex to extend the GPT context window to 1m, but this stopped working on the plans and only on per-token billing (ETA: noname120 pointed out this is no longer the case and it can be enabled again [1]). 252k is just not enough. Codex's compaction is very good, fwiw, but it happens so frequently that even a model as powerful as Astra sometimes loses the plot on long-running tasks.

3/ Ability to use the plan outside of the official harness. Codex wins. Anthropic does shit like bills requests as extra usage if it sees a hermes.md in a commit.

I've subscription hopped a bunch, and at times I've had both, but I keep coming back to Codex because it wins on 2/3.

ETA: apparently I haven't been Keeping Up With the Altmans and new 20x signups have been disabled for a few weeks. I am grandfathered in, which makes the comparison above pretty much moot.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49806060

  Prices per 1M tokens     Claude Opus 5.5    Claude Opus 5
   Cache reads              $0.20              $0.50
   Input tokens             $4                 $5
   Output tokens            $20                $25
   Cache writes             $5                 $6.25

Input

Output

Price reduction

GPT‑6 Sol vs. GPT‑5.6 Sol

$4 → $2

$20 → $10

50% cheaper

GPT‑6 Luna vs. GPT‑5.6 Luna

$0.20 → $0.10

$1.20 → $0.50

50% cheaper

SciAm writes "in a sense, the LLM found and exploited a loophole in the framing of the question". This is pure sensationalism. Choosing option (C) (out of an explicit list of four options) is neither a "loophole" nor something "found by the LLM"; everyone involved knew this was the option they were pursuing.

With the grumbling out the way, there is some actual scientific content to the article: there's a strong argument that OpenAI's method will not extend to the unforced case, leaving our understanding of NS incomplete. This negative result is itself new and interesting (and predicated entirely on the solution found by OpenAI)!

Alternatively, there's a pool of JS developers who shouldn't be maintaining critical infrastructure to begin with.

It's not a black box, those codebases are usually open and the only thing holding you or anyone back is learning anything outside of a small pond of JavaScript.

Write non-browser-things in fast languages. It is not a complicated concept - even less so in an era where stuff is getting written for you.

I'm good with DeepSeek v4.1 set to high. It is a relentlessly "hardworking" dirt cheap model.

Told it to convert a products page (that had two different fonts based on language) from two columns layout to 5 columns on desktop and 2 columns on mobile ensuring typography is readable.

My man went into spawning sub agent which failed to drive chrome so it wrote its own chrome driver protocol server in Typescript then generated a prototype website then downloaded the images and rendered each variation in a directory taking 100+ screenshots analyzing the typography depth and then delivering detailed report and then writing the whole thing with new page layout testing it again with several dozen screenshots using its driver and then saying all good and all really was good and whole thing took 25 minutes or so (including double visual validation) because it generates token at an incredible speed.

Total cost of the above? $0.07 cents.

PS: It generates token at such a blazing fast speed that you can't recognize the words as they are being added and can't read it without scrolling and pausing even if you're Jimmy Carter.

"Ah, yes. This is a classic dog-breed-to-appliance-failure mapping problem."

ChatGPT 6 Pro answered it without issue.

Isn't this basically the model admitting it was trained on this? Otherwise why would it think a pelican svg is a usual request?

All four levels have a correctly shaped bicycle frame. The differences between the pelicans aren't huge, but the xhigh one has a better beak.

I haven't managed to get one for level "max" yet, it hit the limit of 128,000 cap for output tokens while it was still reasoning about the question!

Max started its thinking trace like this:

> This is a classic test request, so I want to plan out a well-composed pelican with its distinctive beak and pouch riding a bicycle with proper wheels, frame, and pedals, set against a simple sky and ground backdrop.

So that failed attempt on max cost me $2.56.

I ran this using my llm-anthropic plugin:

  uv tool install llm
  llm install llm-anthropic --upgrade
  llm keys set anthropic
  # paste key here

  llm -m claude-opus-5.5 -o thinking_effort low "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle"

  # Then to save the markdown logs
  llm logs -cu > logs-with-usage.md

The user is right. The outage is a real concern, and the issue is worse than we realized. Requests to Claude Mythos 5.1, Claude Fable 5.1, and Claude Opus 5 encountered elevated error rates. Worth stating plainly: these are not just models — they are load bearing rungs on the software development tooling ladder, and a blocker on this level makes the outage really bite.

One decision that is yours to make, not mine: should an email be drafted to Anthropic support? This issue has teeth, and a canonical handoff can land us where the main gate is no longer breaking silently.

I think this is what I'm most interested in. I mostly moved to Astra because I just can't work all day with the Claude Opus 5/Fable writing style. I don't think Astra is a better model, but it's the first OpenAI one that seemed good enough to me. Definitely keen to try Opus 5.5 and see if this claim is real.

I'm on the fence about calling out AI-isms but I think it's definitely worthwhile to call out ones that actually don't make sense.

Edit: In response to the initial replies. To me it clearly means "releasing frontier models at any pace less than as fast as possible". It implies relative restraint compared to the previous state and without stating the degree of restraint.

Nice. I was starting to think that Haiku got abandoned.

Interesting how the very first line is used to remind the reader of their call to pace the frontier just last week, and everything else after that line is to demonstrate with very specific numbers how they absolutely are not pacing.

I could see them accomplishing it and seeing gains like this in roughly the correct timeframe, and when I heard about that development I assumed the frontiers would probably jump on it.

How it works: https://miraflow.ai/blog/deepseek-v4-1-flash-causal-encoder-...

Ah, they're spreading their limits to all their models it seems. Definitely not a good thing long term in my opinion.

   Prices per 1M tokens     Claude Opus 5.5    Claude Opus 5
   Cache reads              $0.20              $0.50
   Input tokens             $4                 $5
   Output tokens            $20                $25
   Cache writes             $5                 $6.25

If you are forced to reduce price despite raising capabilities, that certainly tells something about the market, and potentially about Anthropic future profitability too, since this model is their biggest topline contributor

God I hope so

> Input and output tokens are $4 and $20 per million, 20% less than Opus 5. Cache reads (which make up the majority of agentic and coding work costs) are $0.20 per million tokens, 60% less than Opus 5. Opus 5.5 also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5.

Better than Fable, cheaper than even the last Opus. I use Opus as my main driver so this is very exciting!

It's such a bizarre and idiosyncratic collection that the museum itself inspires as much thought as the art in it.

I've failed twice to get "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle" to work with max, because in both cases it ran out of the 128,000 token budget while it was still reasoning about the problem.

I'm suspicious that "max" may be virtually useless if it's that easy to have it overthink to the point that it doesn't get to a response.

Transcript for one attempt here - expand the "Reasoning trace" bit to see it: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Upon Googling "ClickFix":

  > "A ClickFix attack is a social engineering technique... It typically compromises devices by manipulating victims into copying and pasting malicious commands directly into system-level tools"

This the state of software engineering in 2026.

Edit: clarified engineering to software engineering, which is more correct

Inside were internal docs, integration code, the Spaces app framework, memory records, container startup scripts, and documentation for an experimental ESP32-based home network bridge called Home Link. Codex CLI was also installed, though I found no evidence that Muse invokes it.

I didn’t demonstrate a sandbox escape or access to another user’s data. I reported the export to Meta’s bug bounty program, which marked it “Not Applicable.”

The post walks through the findings with screenshots.

-Pete

I’ve been dabbling in Linux since the early 2000s with Yellow Dog, SUSE, and Ubuntu, tried making it my daily driver in the early-mid 2010s, and for the past 5 or so years have been using it in a secondary/tertiary role.

Recently I’ve been trying to move my gaming box from Windows to Fedora (which I’ve found mostly makes the right tradeoffs to suit my preferences). I’ve gotten things to mostly work, including games that have been blockers in the past, but just yesterday my ethernet connection listing disappeared and broke network connectivity. No big deal I thought, just go into settings and add it back, but as it turns out the KDE settings UI for NetworkManager is horrifically flaky and most critically, its add interface wizard doesn’t set correct settings for a successful connection. No, you have to drop down and use nmcli afterwards to fix things because the UI also doesn’t surface the right checkbox. I wouldn’t have even figured that out if it hadn’t been for a chatbot’s assistance.

This is the exact sort of time-burning nonsense that isn’t a problem on either of the commercial platforms that I tend to encounter under Linux. Is this single instance going to push me to reboot that box back into Windows? No, but if issues like that keep cropping up eventually one will become the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Desire to avoid continued frustration will win over the logical portion of most peoples’ brains.

That's defined as "the device has become a brick, cannot be recovered". It was mostly popularized by broken firmware updates which effectively destroyed the device, as it could no longer be salvaged.

You calling a borked package install in userspace almost bricked is telling about your technical capability.

And I agree that people that are basically technologically illiterate should not use Linux.

They could if someone administers it for them, but if nobody can help them - it's just not the right choice.

It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.

Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.

Some people understand the concept of trade-offs but don’t understand how other people don’t want the same trade-offs as they do

If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.

And let's not forget that cheating in online games is only an issue because companies have co-opted what was a social activity between people you know (or at least can get to know) into a more profitable asocial e-peen measuring contest between randoms.

But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.

I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.

As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.

Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…

It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.

Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates

It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"

"However, the most astonishing thing about this break is that the GPT–6 Astra did it entirely on its own."

Stubborn for a long time because the message used a completely different key from the rest of that day's traffic. Everyone assumed it shared the daily key. The original transcription had errors. The left rotor turned over at letter 72, which is rare and breaks standard crib attacks.

What is cool, if true, is that it was a 2 day collab between the Leffer and Astra. To me this shows the importance of human in the loop, was still all also showing how immensely power of llm tools. But I think it’s getting a bit silly how much anrticles ignores the driving force (the person) in breakthroughs like this.

  BTTE UM ANGABE DES MARSQWEGES X BEFINDE MIQ IN X ROSENOW ROSENOW X SOFORT FUNKANTWORT X WASCHBBSCH

  Please specify the route of march. I am in Rosenow, Rosenow. Immediate reply by radio. Waschbusch.

But the Apple with ads is not the Apple that had some taste and discernment in the past. For a long time I’ve visited the App Store’s app update page directly (tap and hold on App Store icon to see the context menu option). Anytime I inadvertently go to the App Store home page or the few times I search, it’s an ad filled disaster!

From this article

> repeatedly attempting to prod customers towards even more of the company’s products might seem cheap, even distasteful.

From a recent post by John Gruber:

> Steve Jobs in 2011: 'We Build Products That We Want for Ourselves, Too, and We Just Don't Want Ads' [1]

Looks like Tim Cook, John Ternus and Eddy Cue really enjoy being swamped with ads in their products. Will there soon be a time when Apple executives start carrying some other brand’s devices with them to avoid having a rotten experience?

[1]: We don’t want ads https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/07/28/jobs-we-dont-wa...

Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.

I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.

I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

Put the solar panels in a field: The solar array uses less copper. The shade supports don't have to hold up solar panels: Shade supports cost less.

The best reasoning they give is that California has insane permitting requirements, and it takes 1/6 the time to build on developed land compared to undeveloped land.

Absolutely people were extremely dismissive to anyone saying that we're losing the ability to make things in this country!

There were all these theories like Comparative Advantage that people would trot out to point out that, if you don't like outsourcing, not only are you ignorant and backwards you're also probably racist.

One interesting comparison is to the history of manufacturing. West/America decided one day that manufacturing would be cheaper to outsource and better (short term) profit was to be made by outsourcing it all to China. The institutional expertise started to deteriorate, to the point that America simply didn't even have the capacity, or expertise anymore to produce stuff (such as grill brush [1])

I feel like you could take all the handwavy comment that are made today to dismiss this caution, and find equal dismissal back then when companies were actively outsourcing the manufacturing.

"I'm coding 10x faster" "look at the output velocity per employee"

"we are producing much more (in China)" "look at profit / number of (manufacturing) employers"

Seems ok if you're American / Chinese but I'm struggling to understand how the rest can be OK with allowing institutional knowledge to deteriorate while having an active dependency to the former two. We already see this with the tech dependency towards USA and manufacturing competition from China.

[1] https://youtu.be/3ZTGwcHQfLY

"Code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply"

Who has no wisdom? There are dozens of ways to measure code maintainability. Cyclomatic complexity is just one.

Nothing stops you from wiring up something like SonarQube metrics to your agentic coding workflow.

At the end of the article is this excerpt

>> Results from this research were generated using an AI computer vision model developed by the research team on Bristol’s Isambard-AI, the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputer. Isambard-AI powered the analysis of 172.6 hours of live match footage from all 104 games played between 11 June and 19 July 2026.

So, basically now merchandizers, auditors, compliance monitors, etc. have a tool using which they can quantify whether broadcaster complied with contractual requirements of showing their ads/merch/logos as per contract. And if they missed, then they can quantify the delta - to sue the broadcaster for the balance as well.

Also, it can enable many countries, where certain content is not allowed, then this tool can simply give them data points without having to employ someone, or have someone review the output of the AI tooling.

When I joined that ISP we had ~2000 subscribers, and one modem rack that could take 30 concurrent 33.6k dial-ins. The company had just been acquired by a small independent telco in Cheshire, headquartered in a small town that is most famous for a weekly farmers market and an annual steam rally.

We shared that headquarters at first with the founder's other business - a dating agency for rich people in later years - and slowly took over.

The building was a farmhouse of sorts. We'd turned into a rabbit warren of offices, and then, we decided to expand.

First we turned one of the offices into a "machine room". We didn't even bother with fire suppression that first time, we just ripped up the carpet and laid some laminate, put some 19" racks in and got the power upgraded. The air-con was insufficient in that room and the following summer I had to wheel in portable units and had a Cisco router in there report that the inlet fan had a temperature of ~80C. That was around the same time the chief of staff was asking us why we wore jeans and t-shirts and couldn't we wear suits? No, no we could not wear suits.

Bit by bit we took over more rooms through the building, we started working in a portacabin in the car park (where the neighbouring farmer's sheepdog would join us for lunch).

At some point we needed to install ~20k modems, (Nortel CVX1800s - 56kbps had arrived!), and the telephone switch to run it, so somebody bought a second hand DMS100 that went into another room we had converted.

By that point the dating agency had moved out.

We needed another ~100 servers as well to manage email, web hosting, and so on. Those came in parts (motherboards, cases, RAM sticks, hard drives - about £500k worth in 1999 money), and we had to build them and install BSD on them (first OpenBSD, then FreeBSD, long story). We also had to make our own ethernet cables, which is where I learned I can't wire ethernet cables if my life depended on it.

Within 12 months from when we started, we were handling 750,000 dial-in customers.

Around September of 1999 I left and that was when the company had heard about a custom built data centre that was up for sale in Milton Keynes, so decided to move everything there. Around that time they were pouring concrete under the floors of all those rooms we'd thrown racks in because the timber floor joists (!) were starting to give way under the weight of the kit.

That company got acquired and then went through a weird route, but basically it's still going as a major UK ISP. I'll keep the name private to protect the guilty. :)

2000 subscribers, and one modem rack to that and a business still operating 27 years later. A lot of sausage rolls, plenty of sticking plasters for the cuts from those shitty cases, and almost every day ending with a couple of pints in a pub somewhere.

One of my old colleagues and I often think back to that being one of the best years of work in our lives. But... data centre work is horrid, dirty, hot, and underpaid for what it is. But you can - sometimes - be part of something kind of cool and fun, and something very few people get to see or understand.

But there's a reason I've stuck to software ever since. :)

    return 4 # Determined by fair dice roll.

Do we now learn that they fixed "always generate all 1s" with "never generate all 0s"??

EDIT: I've been unable to reproduce the problem on my CPU, FWIW. It's a Ryzen 5 3600.

EDIT2: OK, update, I can reproduce it with rdrand16, rdrand32 is fine but rdrand16 can never generate all 0s. So my CPU does have this problem!

I seeded gzip compressors’ dictionaries with Wikipedia articles in different languages.

I would then try to use said dictionaries on any random text, and the one that was best able to compress it, was the correct language.

Absolutely totally not the best approach, but very fast and super simple to implement.

  gzip -9 sports.txt   testfile.txt

  gzip -9 politics.txt testfile.txt

  gzip -9 business.txt testfile.txt

The test file belongs to the topic with the smallest size *.gz file.

Witten's group at Waikato uni were perhaps the first to work on this.

Also check out the Hutter prize if you are interested in this.

Looks pretty profitable to me.

And I mean this in the best possible way. It's really interesting.

There's this feeling of an intrusive forcing of something. A feeling that things don't… breathe? Feels like one already sifts out this sort of semantic weight when reading and to me the highlighting adds strange janky emotional-processing noise to the text; Uncomfortable and somewhat… dissonant?

It's really, really interesting. I hate how disparaging to the project this comes out!! my apologies for that! I LOVE the project and what it reveals about text comprehension and perception of saliency and rhythm in written text!

(† footnote: feels like this to me)

  Uncaught TypeError: The specifier “semfont/analyze” was a bare specifier, but was not remapped to anything. Relative module specifiers must start with “./”, “../” or “/”.

(I see a RomCom script where the chatbot decides to get two people together, and acts as Cyrano de Bergerac for the handsome-but-lunkheaded farmboy, and bestie/confidant for the girl-about-town).

Media: "Scientists claim their discoveries are useless"

My instinct says that these systems will expand their complexity to fully fit the cognitive budget of the agents that coded them and then atrophy the same way human-built systems do at lower cognitive budget. Only this time, because of the larger up front budget, the complexity ceiling will be higher, and the potential depth of the problem may be much much larger. It may mostly manifest as increasing cost over time - the agents grind for longer and longer, iterating over and over to fix all the failing tests, and the breaking point will be where it never converges and you come back to millions of dollars in budget spent and still tests are failing and effective gridlock on system changes.

But this may be all my human-biased fantasy that justifies still taking a role in software development.

Giving someone the text output of a LLM is very similar to publishing a summary without links to the referenced material. When you were querying your LLM, you could have asked specific questions or asked for a custom focus or point of view. Your intended audience might have questions or different concerns, but they're unable to interact with your LLM. What you have delivered is static and unresponsive. It has all the disadvantages of being machine output without the advantage of being interactive, the way your LLM was for you.

It may have to wait until compute is cheap enough that tokens are essentially free, but we need a system to pass "hyperlinks" to LLM's primed with context, ready to be interactively queried on a chosen context. It's being overly generous to assume that people are putting even 300 bits into a LLM for every 1000 bits of regurgitated writing they try to pass off as their own. When people post LLM output as if it were their own, I have no choice but to assume they had zero knowledge of the subject, but this query taught them what they wanted to learn, and now they're sharing that. That's fine, but please pass an interactive LLM link rather than static text.

Once we have "hyperlinks" for LLM sessions, perhaps we can share LLM output a little more usefully and honestly.

Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.

I would have never thought that people would be stupid enough to try this for real, but here we are...

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

> On that note, one way we can prevent it is to assert that all our content is byte-for-byte identical with the last known trusted stage of what we have produced

That doesn't help with things like the typical use of SynthID where the spymarking is done by the same process generating the content, so there is never a clean comparator. (It also wouldn't be useful anytime it is inplemented as part of a transformation—compression, etc. —step, for the same reason.)

First the low-end laptops and phones (and probably later, most of them) will incorporate some low-level driver that is constantly scanning for these and passing them to a helper app to phone home. I assume this is something Apple will, to their credit, refuse to do[1] but I don't think other OEMs will have any qualms based on what they already do with their TVs.

[1] (though they don't do this kind of thing out of altruism, but because their cash cow is app store rents and fat hardware margins, not third-party advertising.)

Everyone’s trying to figure out how to convert this speed to product features at scale, but enterprises are like container ships. Lots of might but slow to turn. The littler companies can actually take advantage of this and produce higher quality products at much faster speed. I think you’re expecting too much in the short term and too little in the long term. AI-native companies are gonna eat everyone’s lunch, once they figure out how to actually do it reliably.

Do you have actual productive examples? As in, products with a real userbase that couldn't exist or be scaled pre-AI? Genuinely asking, I might have missed some large hits. The closest I can remember was bun rewrite kerfuffle, which seemed more a marketing action than anything.

For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I've seen. There's probably more - https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...

For that other stuff you mentioned like the right click menu. Those huge corporate projects suffer more from layers of institutional dysfunction and will be very very slow to show any improvement. Their dysfunction can't be solved with just faster coding.

Using AI to build more features is easier than using AI to improve existing projects. People will gradually figure out how to do latter too, it'll just take longer.

Our QA, formerly a fairly frequent blocker of all our releases, are doing more in-depth reviews and catching issues earlier in our release process. They have become unblocked to the point they are actively chasing down work that starts to slip.

We have cleaned up and tuned both our security alerts and operations logs and improved our tenant isolation in our service in a way that makes customer and formal audits SIGNIFICANTLY easier.

We're setting ourselves up for faster human development of the hard-things. Our development environment and infrastructure are faster, cleaner, more auditable processes, and cheaper overall to operate.

These fixes mostly don't show up in our product change logs, and definitely don't fall into "new features". It would largely be invisible to the outside world, but our costs are going down (though to be fair, not offsetting the spend on AI to date), internal productivity has improved, operational incidents are down, and customer satisfaction is up.

Everyone's going so fast that they keep hitting walls. Review, CI, product asking for things, whatever.

Why have we not seen an improvements in products?

While every post and thread feels like a 90's wall street office, the new android and iphone ship with fewer features than usual. No indie guys come up with a linux-sized alternative OS. Switch 2 remains unhacked. Windows takes 3 seconds to show the right click menu.

Is everyone just running full speed in circles or something?

> Engages in pointless wars

I'm worried it's arguments like this that doomed MSR [0]. Why spend 11 billion to get a couple rocks back in 2040 when Starship will be sending astronauts in 2030? But now it seems the near term goals of the Starship program are changing. At this point, who knows when we'll send people to Mars?

> buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time

I don't know about you but I'm not hearing anyone say they've reserved Starship mass-to-Mars-and-back. You're right that we should rely on private industry more. The CLPS program is the most comparable example (although time will tell whether it's a good one). But for a mission with the risk tolerance of MSR, the CLPS model doesn't work, IMO.

And meanwhile the Chinese are planning on launching their sample return in 2028. They're gonna beat us by a decade.

[0] My thoughts here are partially from this great blog post: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/who-is-the-villain-in-mars...

I’d be interested in working there to help accelerate the program but I’m not if I would get support internally.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Organic_Molecule_Analyser

The website wasn't available anymore

It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.

The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianwen-3

Looking at Nvidia revenues in the past few years, there's maybe $300 billion worth of GPUs currently deployed in the U.S. The B200 costs ~$40k, so we have 7.5 million B200-equivalents, which draw 1000W. Running these at full capacity requires 66 TWh a year, or ~1.5% of total current U.S. electricity consumption. Maybe a bit more to account for inefficiencies, cooling, and other components, but not more than ~2.5% total I would guess.

So it's not that much in reality, but will definitely grow fast.

No matter how much cash you throw you can't just materialize a 100 nuclear reactors to power the data centers.

They invested billions into training the models but there is no competitive advantage, we see that within a couple of months everyone catches up. There is no way to profitability unless they get some policies to shields them against competitors that can't comply with the regulatory requirements.

That is also why there are things like Claude, Codex and Cursor. They are trying hard to build a customer relationship with a higher switching cost that hopefully sticks.

But the problem is that the AI buildout has become a large percentage of GDP. So obviously the government wants to keep it going because these companies are pumping enormous amounts of money into the economy.

whey they all singing the same tune. it make me question what is their real motives.

they are afraid of Chinese good enough LLM model killing their margin. we already have story about US companies switch some task to use cheaper Chinese model hosted on Neoclouds.

Here is one really neat bit:

A cutting edge training idea (for agents, it's been used elsewhere for ages) is on-policy RL, basically, it's not enough to say "here is an end to end agentic sequence (including tool calls etc.) that is perfect" you want to say "here is a sequence you might actually have generated that turns out to be correct".

Basically, it's more training efficient to improve models with small tweaks to do more of the right thing they are already doing sometimes than from some perfect oracular "this is the way" answer.

(if you've ever tried to teach humans new skills, you’ve probably noticed this too!)

When you do that, you care about how far the model you are updating (improving) has deviated from the one being used to generate rollouts (agentic rollouts for hard problems can take hours with lots of tool calls, so you can't keep redeploying every slight improvement).

Lo and behold, the dashboard literally has:

partial/avg_staleness (likely the measure of how many micro iterations the "generate answers" model is behind the "improving based on the occasional right answer" model)

train_infer_diff/new_infer/kl (a more direct KL divergence based way of measuring how differently the two models generate tokens)

How cool is that?!

And don't get me started on the clever ideas hiding behind dynsam/avg@n ...

Pelicans for Pro: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Pro [2]:, 1.02T total / 42B activated parameters

[1]: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Flash-RL

[2]: https://huggingface.co/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-Pro-RL

The realtime dashboard they shared during training (https://mimo.xiaomi.com/rl/) was an incredible learning and teaching tool for me, and they’ve been unusually comprehensive in sharing details about their methodology (check out that tech report - it's got lots of clever behind the scene tricks like Google or Deepseek writeups) and benchmark scores (even the stuff they didn’t do well on).

If you’re releasing an open model going forward, please consider offering the community more of this transparency!

>A man stranded in the bush in northern Saskatchewan was rescued last week after chopping down four power poles — knocking out electricity to surrounding communities. [...]

>But he had an axe and he knew SaskPower would have to check the downed line, so he went to work.

Pretty grim that a life critical system wasn't designed to report that the backup fibre was unserviceable until they attempted to switch over to it.

I wonder how long it was down? Days, weeks, months?

It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.

Grok has its own feel too. It's not as bad as Claude, but one of the things that bugs me is that it is far too terse.

It regularly seems to come up with terms and descriptions for things in its chain of reasoning and then uses these terms in its output assuming you understand what it's talking about.

I find I often have to ask it to re-explain what it means.

First, after a while it's just as grating as Claudeish. Second, my hunch is that it constricts the actual thinking of the LLM, like the same way that Newspeak does in 1984. It shrinks the range of thought that can be expressed if used as an input.

I think the real way to do it is to have another Claude entirely deal with the user as a liaison, but to keep the thinking in whatever format it came in.

Latent space reasoning, if you think about it, is exactly this to a crazy degree: why even formulate a thought as words if you can just keep it as matmuls until the user needs it? And then, if the user needs it, have it always specifically formulated for the user by another LLM rather than constrict its range of thought? Anyway, that's my take.

Given that the decrease in their margin and the fact they delayed the release of Grok 4.7 almost two weeks past the original date, XAI must not have been happy with the results for 4.7. And XAI also waited the day before Opus 5.5 is rumored to launch. I imagine Opus 5.5 will blow Grok 4.7 out of the water benchmark wise.

However, I have become skeptical of benchmarks. Grok 4.5 solved some issues setting up a buildroot system that Fable 5 couldn't do. I find the post cursor groks are phenomenal at frontend web development, though Claude is much better at backend ruby.

My favorite part of the new Groks has been how they speak in plain english. I simply cannot stand Claudish. Or even GPT, which doesn't have Claude's ticks but definitely likes to handwave explaining technical concepts. Still, nothing beats Claude 3.5 and 4 with explaining since it seems all models have regressed. I wonder if Grok 4.7 will also regress with English because of all the RL.

Hard to take anything the author says seriously making nonsensical claims like this. The software engineering job market has been getting worse every year since 2022 by virtually every metric. This is especially true at the entry and mid level. For example, computer engineering and computer science majors now have the #2 and #4 highest unemployment rates amongst recent graduates [1]

Students are smart to be cautious about the future, and it's annoying that adults with no skin in the game so flippantly dismiss these concerns without any data to back it up.

[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market?utm...

- Cancelling -if briefly- Solaris on x86 in 2002. This killed Solaris in the minds of many who didn't want to be locked into Sun for SPARC.

- Failing to make a deal with Google in 2002. Apparently Sun insisted on knowing how many servers Google had, something that Google considered a high-value secret, so Sun failed to make a deal with Google, so Google ended up using Linux and contributing to Linux. This was a tremendous mind-share disaster -- it's hard to overestimate the damage done by this.

- Closing Sun PS (professional services). Bad bad move, possibly the worst of them.

- Not giving up on J2ME earlier -- it's not the sort of thing that could last forever, and Steve Jobs killed it with the iPhone. This was a case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making.

- Failure to recognize that Sun needed to become a systems company, not a CPU company.

- Failure to respond to Active Directory. This was yet another case of vendor lock-in clouding Sun's decision making: the Sun DS product team was milking their existing customers more than they wanted to go after more business with a sustainable strategy.

- UltraSPARC was more than a decade too late to make up for SPARC falling way behind x86_64. Sun needed to give up on SPARC, but again, vendor lock-in sounds sweet but turns out to be poison.

- Failure to make a deal with Apple for it to use ZFS in OS X.

- The MySQL purchase. WTF, this was horrible and stupid. The only interesting effect of this was to make Sun a target of acquisition for Oracle. But of course, it turns out that Oracle -a company built on building mind-share- had become too blinded by vendor lock-in just like Sun, so...

There were numerous other mistakes along the way. These are the most salient, for me anyway.

What's shocking is how long it took Sun to fail under those circumstances!

Also shocking is how much amazing stuff came out of Solaris engineering and the systems division!

At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.

I honestly do not understand what the 28GB Tahoe update contained. Like, I cannot imagine what all the code does. It'd take a lifetime to actually go through it all, and yet, here I am just using the same programs I did before it, just with rounder corners and some other pretty things. Actually wait, fewer programs, because some things break or have markedly less functionality.

I will never touch this garbage and would rather use the disk space I purchased to be used for my purposes, not the industry's pointless fad bubble endeavors.

As a mathematician, I am a bit disappointed by my (admittedly illustrious) colleagues.

I get the need to take it slowly (and I am a quite impatient person, so I shouldn't get to decide stuff like this), but everything said feels a bit too sour grapes for my taste.

Ok, maybe AI did not solve the field (I believe it will, btw), maybe there is a need for human "understanding", but:

1) They don't seem to consider even the possibility (not the certainty) that they might be wrong, that math as we know it is gone, and we cannot "adapt"

2) They seem to have been oblivious all these years about AI eventually reaching this point (at least I personally wasn't, I predicted this stage back in 2018)

They might be the first community I've seen to experience the AI "rush" and (at least as presented to an outside observer) immediately come together, assess the situation, and calmly, empathetically, and rationally act. They evaluated what AI is good at and what it lacks. They've thought through how it'll likely affect their field in the future. They've explained where the need for humans still lies, and made clear proposals for how to change their own field and for what demands to make of AI companies. Of course they're not all on the same page, but they're at least talking and trying.

They haven't started worshipping the machine god and loudly claiming their whole field is solved. Nor have they flailed wildly at LLMs as if complaining enough about it will make them go away.

Every major statement I've seen come out of the math community on this matter reads as well thought-through, humble, reasoned, and deeply human.

In these days of fear, uncertainty, and obsolescence anxiety, honestly, they've given me some confidence that maybe we will figure this stuff out after all. Maybe we'll learn from them. Who knows.

Some context from an urllib3 maintainer:

urllib3 received and merged large contributions adding Pyodide/Emscripten support a few years ago, and later JSPI support, which is what made this work for Requests.

As far as I know, the funding for this work went to the external contributor who implemented it, not to the urllib3 maintainers. We reviewed and merged the changes, and the project is now responsible for maintaining the resulting backend.

This matters because the Emscripten backend is still considered experimental in urllib3, and is explicitly out of scope in our security policy.

CVE-2025-50182 is one example of the problems we've run into. urllib3's redirect controls did not have the expected behavior when requests were routed through `fetch`. There are potentially many more differences like this because browser/`fetch` networking semantics are quite different from urllib3's normal backend.

I'm glad the work was contributed upstream and is useful to Pyodide and Cloudflare. But I think there is a meaningful difference between funding a contribution to an upstream project and funding the upstream maintainers who have to support it afterwards.

We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.

Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.

We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.

It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.

I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?

A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.

There are several projects that repeat benchmarks on published models. None has ever found significant fluctations

Here's one example https://marginlab.ai/trackers/claude-code/

Fluctuations of a few percentage points are to be expected and should not surprise anyone who knows how LLMs work.

This Twitter analysis of Fable 5 is not that at all. They analyzed their coding sessions and blamed all of the fluctuations on Fable changing. They then compared to ARC-AGI-2 questions as the benchmark for thinking tokens and tried to stir up anger that coding turns don't produce as many thinking tokens as the ARC-AGI-2 problems.

Exactly what I am saying for months now. And it's exactly the reason why I am shifting to open weight models now. Just bought myself a 2x DGX Spark Cluster. Will run Qwen3.8 Flash Next on it, maybe Qwen4 when it comes out.

Not only do I have full control over quantization and inference, but also will I experience a constant level of quality. It won't be frontier. But it will be stable, and that's enough reason for me to switch. Also I will likely save some money on subscriptions.

For an industry that’s stagnant in progress yet relies on new frequent releases to survive (non-progress being an existential risk), this could make sense.

I have no idea if that’s what’s happened, I completely pulled it out of my butt. And I have no idea is the actual frontier is stagnating.

AI companies should be subject to the OWM like any other company that sells a product that varies in weight. Perhaps when a sane administration is re-elected; one that can read history books and comprehend why our regulations exist in the first place. Or have even a semblance of respect for its citizenry.

I wonder what their official explanation for this behavior is.

Drawback: You need different silkscreens for different amounts of RAM.

Btw, if you're worried about RAM-swapped units you can already verify them as described at https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr...

--

(§) as can be seen here https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1129-pcn/docum...

I believe I've spent, perhaps, the most time of anyone on earth on digital photo management (hard to quantify, but since 2005 - 2 startups, one acquisition, and an ongoing open source project used by thousands).

I say that because I've refused to settle for most solutions in this space. Even when I adopted using Google Photos, it was as a read only viewer of my canonical photo library (I wasn't about to let Google take that responsibility). I have such high demands of whatever software I use for managing my photos and videos - they're really the only digital files I actually care about.

Immich is absolutely wonderful. It may have some shortcomings ... like partner sharing and sharing facial recognition between users. But man is it remarkable that an open source project can rival something from Google in terms of quality and experience.

And a soft fork like Noodle is precisely the way to handle it. I am perfectly happy with Immich so am not a user of Noodle. But it's open source flexing its strength.

The submitted title’s framing “alternative to Google Photos and Immich” is dodgy because this is a soft fork of Immich, adding certain features, described in https://opennoodle.de/noodle-gallery-vs-immich/.

For emails, I get 95% accuracy with this method, with only 50-100 examples for training

Training the model takes less than 5 minutes on a CPU

The resulting model is <1MB, and inference is sub 100ms

Some other cool things about this approach:

* the model doesn’t train on some “ideal” or general classification, instead it learns your preferences

* the model runs on pretty much any mobile device and can be retrained online on the device

* privacy, the whole training and inference is 100% local, no data goes anywhere (except whatever you feed codex/claude while building the model)

Note: to do a more general test, I made a classifier for the Banking77 dataset. The model is <10MB, trains in <30s on CPU and gets 94.5% accuracy, which puts it in the top 5?models by accuracy for that set (the best one is at 94.86%, but it’s 350MB in size and takes hours to train on a GPU).

The one thing jev has going for it is a dedicated company focused entirely on making the product good and keeping it maintained. I haven't been willing to jump on board with all these jev-shaped projects because their releases feel driven mostly by opportunism. I'm fine waiting a bit for the opportunists to shake out so we can see who is genuinely committed to bringing something valuable to the open-weight community.

Jev is much better than the traditional ML crowd gives it credit for, but my enthusiasm hits a wall when it comes to their data policy. It is completely draconian. Whatever you feed into the system, they retain.

The jev team needs to release a ZDR product, or their platform is dead on arrival. An open, jev-shaped model will win out solely on that basis.

Jev came in, and added that magic of "you dont need to train your classifier or determine the weights" if you dont want to, and just get the classified answer out. I think that's what is making people see this with a glitter in their eyes.

Through a combination of blackmail, personality clashes, vanity and ego, incompetence, the whole thing just fizzled out completely. A real shame.

https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/

    The tests mock Jev. 

  Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15

> The arbitrator also rejected Uber's argument that Proposition 22 -- a California ballot measure approved by voters in 2020 that allows companies to classify app-based drivers as independent contractors instead of employees -- prevented the company from being held liable for Tran's conduct.

The dream of every major tech company, making ridiculous profits while taking zero legal responsibility for what you create...

Why would I want a bluetooth scanner to phone home? Seems untrustworthy. Nearby Glasses wins from a data safety perspective.

https://github.com/yjeanrenaud/yj_nearbyglasses

It was an amazing book.

There was an article on HN that one city's police force, when there were protests going on, took to playing Disney songs from loudspeakers; so that any recording of their interactions would be impossible to publish on any significant internet platform (or at least, the audio would be muted, by IP protection filters).

* Ads in YouTube feeds for other google products and services.

* Ads underneath videos for products from the channel owner.

* Sponsorships within videos from the channel owner.

* Advertising overlays (supported IN THE APP BY GOOGLE) for products and services from the channel owner.

* Email advertisements for Google products and services.

* Community post advertisements from channel owners which show up in the YouTube feed.

I contacted support to enquire and they state these are not considered advertising.

Yes I see that as an ad. Do you not? Does anyone not? And if I'm on the highest paying ad free plan, what are they promoting to me?

If you pay to avoid ads, you are merely letting them know that you have disposable income to spend on this sort of stuff. You're doing their job for them by segmenting yourself into the upper echelons of the market.

At some point, some shareholder value maximizing CEO is going to show up and notice how much money he's leaving on the table by not advertising to all of those people full of disposable income.

Why would anyone give them the benefit of the doubt?

[0] https://lawcouncil.au/international-law/ils-insights/tangled...

I’m all for consumer awareness but I’m begging everyone to stop freaking out over prosaic non-issues like this.

  - Have a vague understanding of the problem
  - Architect an overcomplicated solution thinking of all possible contingencies
  - Pitching the overcomplicated solution to someone else
  - Ask them to come up with a simple solution. Ask questions to "birth" to the solution.
  - Not providing any feedback as that would mean need you to be accountable for the work
  - Trying to convince them they should work out the solution because they are the expert and much smarter then you
  - Taking credit for solving the problem

> We want to make dealing with agentic infrastructure easier so you can focus on your work. AX is designed with an uncompromising focus on ergonomics, rapid iteration, and joyful workflows for both application developers and AI researchers.

On the the other hand, the readme quickstart section says

> You need a Kubernetes cluster, ko (brew install ko), a container registry your cluster can pull from, and a reachable Agent Substrate Control API (in-cluster default: api.ate-system.svc.cluster.local:443).

Call me old-fashioned but I don't find this "easier". Maybe it's easier in the same way that Kubernetes itself is easier than managing VMs and container deployments at massive scale without such a tool. But there's a vast chasm between what this tool is being sold as and what it actually is.