TIL about Fredkin’s paradox. “With this kind of decision, what Fredkin’s paradox tells us is if it’s very difficult to decide, it’s probably because the alternatives are equivalent, and therefore it doesn’t matter which one you choose.”

The Universe of Short Film is an amazing site for watching, sharing, and connecting around short films. This is really cool…not sure why the site isn’t better known.

The Excel games have gone extreme, tossing four top competitors into urban wilds around the world in a one-off battle, which reigning champion Diarmuid Early won at the last minute. Irish phenom Early captured the win in the Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle over the weekend after a last-minute comeback that saw him take down Andrew Ngai by a mere 40 points (1060 to 1020) in the 30-minute contest. Jaq Kennedy and Nicolas Micot made up the back half of the chart. The conceit of the whole one-off contest, which was co-sponsored by hardware manufacturer Asus, was to stick the four contestants in the wild around four landmarks, forcing them to deal with weather, potentially flaky internet, and - shudder - the public who might wander over and question what exactly they were doing. Early, who now resides in New York, competed overlooking the Statue of Liberty; Kennedy near Big Ben; Micot at the Eiffel Tower; and Ngai overlooking Sydney Harbour. Hardware for the contest was provided by Asus, which doled out ExpertBook Ultras and wireless portable second screens to each contestant. MEWC said the contest was inspired by the remote work undertaken by many modern professionals, who increasingly work “across client sites, airports, cafés, co-working spaces, and remote locations, instead of behind a desk in an office.” The competition goes back to 2021. It was a 2022 broadcast on ESPN, however, that made competitive Excel a … um … popular thing to watch. MEWC competitions pit Excel experts against each other to solve complex problems designed ahead of time by other Excel experts. In the 2025 World Championship in Las Vegas, where Early beat Ngai to win the trophy, puzzles included doing things like solving a jigsaw puzzle using Excel. The 2022 competition broadcast on ESPN included the spreadsheet platformer Modelario, as well as tasks involving a yacht regatta and slot machine-style games. The one-off Landmark Battle took its inspiration from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, and saw the quartet of competitors racing through a seven-part puzzle to decipher the fastest travel route for a group of spreadsheet-bound characters intent on duplicating Phileas Fogg’s feat. According to MEWC, Early came from behind to win the contest using his signature strategy of “core-first, bonus-later,” which involves solving all the core challenges of a puzzle before returning after completion to see how many bonus questions he can pull off. Having been deployed to the field with nothing but a cameraman and the laptop they were working on, none of the competitors were aware of their opponents' live scores, meaning that Early won without knowing how close the contest had become. Qualifiers for the 2026 world championship are ongoing, and Early is an early favorite so far. Six of nine Road to Las Vegas qualifier matches have taken place so far, and Early has won three of them. ®

When it comes to AI services, you don't necessarily get what you pay for. It turns out that AI models with expensive tokens may cost less than models with cheap tokens for particular tasks. And the tooling attached to those models can have a significant effect on cost and output quality. Databricks, which sells data analytics software and services, recently devised an internal coding benchmark to assess the tradeoff between price and performance using various AI models. Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks and associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, said the company undertook the evaluation because models are often tuned to existing benchmark tests like SWE-Bench – which is "broken," according to OpenAI. Databricks devised its benchmark using real engineering tasks performed by its staff to assess how AI agents perform. Zaharia said while the results reflect the company's internal codebase, other companies should be able to conduct similar evaluations using their own code. One of the things Databricks found was that open weight models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 are competitive with frontier models, like Anthropic's Opus 4.8. "It landed in the top capability tier, statistically tied with Opus 4.8 on quality, but costing $1.28/task against Opus’s $1.94," the company said in its report. But the price-per-token doesn't tell the whole story. Databricks contends that price-per-task needs to be considered. "Cheaper per-token does not imply cheaper per-task," said Zaharia in a social media post. "For example, Sonnet 5 costs less per token than Opus 4.8 but used more tokens, resulting in higher cost and lower quality." So while Anthropic's Sonnet 5 was around 1.7x cheaper than Opus 4.8 on a per-token basis, it was more costly on a per-task basis – $2.09 for Sonnet 5 compared to $1.94 for Opus 4.8. That's because it completed tasks less often (81 percent compared to 87 percent), and consumed more tokens to achieve the desired result. Academics already reached this conclusion, noting back in March that in about a third of the model comparisons they conducted, the model with the lower listed price ended up costing more. "For example, Gemini 3 Flash's listed price is 80 percent cheaper than GPT-5.4's, yet its actual cost across all tasks is 38 percent higher," they observed. The other thing that had a significant impact on test results was the harness – software like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and the Pi coding agent – which passes user input to the model, invokes various tools, and returns results. "Harnesses make a huge difference in cost-performance," said Zaharia. "The very simple Pi harness got the same success rate as harnesses from the LLM vendors with Opus and GPT 5.5, but at 2x less cost!" Zaharia attributed the difference to the size of the input – the context – passed to the model with every turn. When Claude Code served as the harness for Opus 4.8, Databricks measured a context of 742,000 tokens per task, compared to 236,999 for Pi. That's about 3.2x fewer tokens overall. With Codex, the total context per task was 1,235,000 tokens, compared to 665,000 tokens for Pi, which is known for its minimal system prompt. Zaharia said the results explain why Databricks built a tool called Omnigent to harness the harnesses – it's a wrapper for combining and swapping multiple coding agents. It's the front-end equivalent of the kind of back-end model swapping that OpenRouter enables. ®

liam.jon_d has added a photo to the pool:

view from the jump ups lookout on the jump up loop road

the jump ups are ‘painted desert’ tablelands characteristic of a swathe of elevated country in outback new south wales and south australia

sturt national park, new south wales, australia

International investors still aren’t interested

A new Incogni survey suggests Americans are pulling back from social media, with more than half saying "maintaining an online presence feels like work" and 55% reporting they post less than they did five years ago. "The full study concludes that there's been a significant shift in public attitudes toward social media," reports PCMag. "Where it was once fun and relaxing, it's now growing dark and angsty..." From the report: As the chart shows, there's also a clear correlation with age. A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer? Those of us in the Boomer category are clearly more relaxed about it, with just 38% saying that maintaining a social presence feels like work. The survey quizzed respondents about how they feel when they don't keep up with checking their socials and, by extension, how they'd feel if they just plain quit. They were given choices, both positive (peace, relaxation, and relief) and negative (anxiety, fear of missing out, and discomfort).

Overall, positive reactions held slightly greater sway, with an average of about 21% compared with 19% for negative reactions. The Gen Y contingent accentuated that split, with 25% positive and 21% negative, while Gen X went even further, with 20% positive and just 13% negative. But the Gen Z group flipped the results, identifying 27% negative and 26% positive reactions to going without social media.

There's another force pushing folks away from the socials: increasing politicization. Of the survey's respondents, 44% agreed that political content is driving people away from social media, and only 20% disagreed. Among Gen Z respondents, the impetus was stronger: 48% agreed, and just 13% disagreed. These negative feelings associated with politics only serve to highlight the positive reactions to deleting your social media.

Are you posting less on social media than you did five years ago, and are you being more selective about who can see what you post? Then you're with the majority. More than half of the respondents answered yes to each of those questions. But would you ever parlay fewer posts into no posts (aka quit posting entirely)? When asked what it would take to finally get them to terminate a social media account, a die-hard group of one in six respondents said there's nothing that could make them quit. But more than half could picture quitting due to security concerns, and almost half accepted the possibility that harassment or hate speech could send them packing. Others cited the amount of time wasted on scrolling through social media and the mental health threats of doomscrolling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is considering major new restrictions on children's access to social media, including age limits, phased access, and an outright ban. "This is not about whether children can access social media," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "It is about when social media can access our children." The Verge reports: Social media platforms could also be forced to prove their services are not harmful before young people are allowed to use them. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc's executive arm could propose new legislation within months, after reviewing recommendations from a panel of experts released today.

The panel recommended using a phased approach, including "no screens at all" for children under 3, supervised internet use for those under 13, and some limits for older teens. It also said social media platforms should have to prove their services are safe to younger users, an approach von der Leyen said she supports. Von der Leyen said the Commission will consider the report and return with proposals "after the summer." Any legislation would still need approval from the European Parliament and the EU's 27 member countries before becoming law across the bloc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jongens waar hebben we dit aan verdiend. 's Werelds twee marktleiders in discours-creatie (Clav en Eretz Yisrael) vinden elkaar op het snijvlak van geo-mogging en clip-farming. En het heeft gewoon echt alles. De bovenstaande IDF-soldate Shira Braun die zegt een beheerder te zijn van het IDF TikTok-account is, heeft een probleem. Het Israëlische i24News schrijft: "The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said Braun had acted without authorization. "The soldier acted without coordination with her commanders, and her conduct does not meet the standards expected of IDF soldiers," the IDF said in a statement. "The incident is under investigation, and the soldier will face disciplinary action." En daar maakte AL JAZEERA dan weer een video over jongens wat is de wereld toch mooi soms. Inmiddels is gebleken dat ze uit het IDF social media-team gehaald wordt, en herplaatst is als KOK. 

Vervolgens vertelt Clav onderstaand dat hij gedineerd heeft met Netanyahu-adviseurs en dat er besproken werd hoe Netanyahu meer 'gehumaniseerd' kon worden. Waar het antwoord dan op was dat Clav met hem naar de sportschool zou kunnen gaan en dit ge-livestreamed kon worden.

Weer daarna wordt hij stevig aan de tand gevoeld tijdens een Israëlisch tv-interview over die keer dat hij in een club Kanye West's Heil Hitler zong met o.a. Nick Fuentes, de Tate-broers, Sneako en Amrou Fudl, en meer in het algemeen zijn 'relatie' met Nick Fuentes (die vrij miniem is). 

En wéér daarna scheldt de dochter van rabbijn Schmuley, degene die bekend staat om haar kosjere sekswinkel, Clav de huid vol tijdens een etentje, ook wegens het zingen van dat Heil Hitler-lied.

Al met al: reden genoeg voor Clav om zijn reis door Israël voortijd af te breken: "People are so negative to you here. It almost makes you want to say, well then I'm not going to come back. That's why I'm leaving". Gelukkig hebben we de beelden nog, allemaal onderstaand.

Echt een gemiste kans voor Israël hoor, Clav kwam er met de beste intenties en dat land kan elke positieve PR gebruiken. Is ze niet gelukt, zonde. Hier nog beelden dat hij verbaal belaagd wordt bij zijn hotel. Een generational fumble, noemen de jongeren dat.

Diner met Netanyahu's adviseurs

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Voortijdig beëindigd 'vijandig' interview over Heil Hitler-zangfestijn en band met Nick Fuentues

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Niet alle Israeli's fan van Clavs Heil Hitler-zangfestijn met Nick Fuentes & Co

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Israeli's hebben hier echt de bal laten vallen hey

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JAAAA het Al-Jazeera filmpje over de geschorste IDF-soldate

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Clav heeft genoeg gezien van het beloofde land

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Is your sex life as private and personal as you think it is? Or is it shaped by – and constantly shaping, in turn – the society and systems you exist in? 

This week we’re joined by Dr. Angela Jones, who asks these questions and much more in their new book, Sex in Public. Angela is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. In addition to scholarly works published in many distinguished journals including Porn Studies and The Black Scholar, they’re the author, co-author and/or editor of several books, including Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook and Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry which came out in 2020 and advanced and informed a lot of my own understanding of the online adult industry especially.

Their latest book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, just launched. As Angela writes: “Revolutionizing how we talk about sex means thinking not just about what a single solitary person should or shouldn't do in bed.” 

We get into the history of sexology, how sex toys complicate our understanding of what counts as sex, whether sex needs a definition at all, what happened when they bought and used a sex doll, and why the most vulnerable moments in their book are also the ones everyone wants to discuss. 

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube.

Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism. If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives

Cash/Consent by Lorelei Lee