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The Verge [no paywall]: “Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift described inside Microsoft as an “AI-powered …
CBO Report – “On September 5, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14347, which authorized the use of “Department of War” (DoW) as a secondary title for the Department of Defense (DoD). CBO was asked to provide an estimate of the cost of implementing that order. CBO was also asked to estimate the cost of …
TeleGeography: “There’s been lots of conversation about the recent boom in submarine cable construction. This flurry of activity becomes clearer when our annual map is viewed over time. Today, we’re putting several years’ worth of maps back-to-back to visualize an evolving undersea network. (And to reminisce about some of our favorite designs, if I’m being …
Android Headline: “Google has released Personal Intelligence for Gemini, a new beta feature that lets the AI give you personalized answers by securely linking to your Gmail, Photos, and YouTube history. Gemini 3 enables the chatbot to think across several data sources to answer hard questions and tailor them for you. The feature is rolling …
“How does iceout.org work? Our objective is to collect community-submitted information about possible ICE activity to help inform the public and raise awareness. All reports are reviewed by our moderator team before appearing on the map. We categorize reports as either confirmed, which are submitted through trusted community partners such as RRNs and nonprofits, or …
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would integrate Elon Musk’s Grok models into military systems: “Last month I took the first step toward changing how the department does business with frontier AI technologies when we announced the rollout of GenAI with our partners from Google, and I want to thank the Google team for …
Press Gazzette. “Google’s search traffic to publishers declined globally by a third in the year to November, according to new Chartbeat data. In addition, referrals to more than 2,500 publisher websites from Google Discover, a feed served to users on Google’s native mobile apps and within its Android operating system, were down 21% year on …
MakeUseOf: “I use Google for almost everything. Search, email, maps, videos, documents, even my calendar. The biggest advantage here is convenience. I don’t have to create dozens of accounts and manage them separately. But it also means I’m giving way too much data to a single company. That’s not exactly a smart thing to do …
EOS – Cuts to funding and staff needed to maintain trusted datasets of reference Earth system observations could limit their availability and quality, undermining hazard predictions and risk assessments. From farming and engineering to emergency management and insurance, many industries critical to daily life rely on Earth system and related socioeconomic datasets. NOAA has linked …
Data is Beautiful – JoonSimJoon: “When researchers write “recent studies show…” – how recent is recent, really? I scraped 749,853 references from 19,108 papers across 200 academic fields using OpenAlex data to find out. TL;DR: Average “recent” = about 5 years Virology/Pandemic research: 2 years (half their citations are from the last 2 years!) Philosophy/History: …
The Atlantic – And that could change everything for the tech industry. Alex Reisner: “On Tuesday, researchers at Stanford and Yale revealed something that AI companies would prefer to keep hidden. Four popular large language models—OpenAI’s GPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and xAI’s Grok—have stored large portions of some of the books they’ve been trained …
The Pragmatic Engineer: “No longer a hypothetical question, this is a mega-trend set to hit the tech industry, Gergely Orosz, Jan 06, 2026. “This winter break was an opportunity for devs to step back from day-to-day work and play around with side projects – including using AI agents to juice up those half-baked or incomplete …
