A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

A sealed copy of Super Mario Bros. NES cartridge recently sold at auction for $3 million. “It bears the coveted gloss sticker seal affixed to the top lid, identifying it as a second-production example.”

To say Elon Musk's AI company has trained some of the most unhinged models on the internet would be an understatement. Grok’s sordid past includes cosplaying as “MechaHitler” and a foray into deepfake porn generation that briefly got the platform banned in some regions. As concerning as that might sound, the recently renamed Eloncorp known as SpaceXAI says Grok, now in version 4.5, has cleaned up its act, wiped its browser history, covered up the swastikas, and is ready to take on more serious endeavors such as tending to your legal quandaries, fiddling in Microsoft Excel, and generating code. “Today we’re launching Grok 4.5, SpaceXAI’s smartest model built to excel at coding, agentic tasks, and knowledge work,” the company wrote in a blog post. “The model is equally adept at office work, scoring number one on Harvey’s Legal Agent Benchmark.” If the company is to be believed, this incarnation of Grok is a whole lot less Van Wilder and more The Office. That is, the Microsoft Office. “Grok Build is capable of building complex Excel models that involve research from the web, multi-sheet formula use, and even leaves stickies or notes behind for future reference,” the company writes. Nothing like slipping in a passive aggressive sticky note to remind your boss you’re totally on board with the office AI mandate. And if Grok does go off the rails and starts fudging the numbers, perhaps it can help keep you out of jail when regulators come knocking – Harvey's Benchmark result aside, recall that Musk and Tesla ended up paying only $40 million to settle fraud charges with the SEC when Musk tweeted out "funding secured" over a supposed Tesla buyout offer that may never have existed. According to SpaceXAI, the model was trained on “tens of thousands" of Nvidia GB300 GPUs alongside Cursor, which it’s currently in the process of acquiring for $60 billion. A major emphasis with this training run was placed on quality rather than quantity. “Beyond raw token volume, we invested heavily in data filtering and curation: deduplication, quality scoring, and domain focused selection so that the data mixture stayed high-coverage and high-signal.” The model was further refined through reinforcement learning — the same technique originally used by OpenAI and DeepSeek to imbue their models with chain of thought “reasoning” capabilities — to teach the model hundreds of thousands of tasks. This has apparently helped cut down on the number of thinking tokens required to solve complex problems, which, along with faster serving speeds of up to 80 tokens a second, means higher-quality results with less delay. Or, at least that’s what SpaceXAI says. Independent benchmarks by Artificial Analysis show the model still isn’t as good as Anthropic’s Claude Fable, but roughly matches OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5. GPT-5.6 — which, much like Fable, set off alarm bells in Washington — is still in preview and hasn’t quite made it on the leaderboard just yet. Also, it's cheap. SpaceXAI is charging $2 per million input tokens and $6 for every million tokens generated. For comparison, GPT-5.5 will set you back $5/M input tokens, $0.50/M cached tokens, and $30/M output tokens. Grok 4.5 is available starting Wednesday in Grok Build, Cursor, and the SpaceXAI console to anyone who doesn’t call the European Union home. You fine folks will have to wait a little longer with rollout expected in mid-July. ®

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

BertvB posted a photo:

A telephoto shot captured from the Zuidpier (South Pier) in IJmuiden, looking across the water towards the Noordpier (North Pier).

The 1970s soap parody made a household name of Lasser, who was also known for her collaborations with ex-husband Allen and later films including Requiem for a Dream

Louise Lasser, star of cult 70s sitcom Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and early films by Woody Allen (to whom she was married for four years), has died aged 87. The New York Times reported she died “at home in Manhattan”.

Lasser’s role as a satirically conceived housewife in suburban Ohio in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, designed as a parody of daytime soap operas, made her a national star, landing her on the cover of People magazine and Rolling Stone. The series lasted a year and a half, between January 1976 and July 1977, but due to its five-days-a-week schedule squeezed more than 300 episodes out of its two season run. Lasser’s Hartman, with her signature pigtails, was preoccupied with domestic minutiae but found herself in unsettling and disturbing situations, including bizarre deaths. The show was intended to explore the changes sweeping ordinary life in the US in the 1970s.

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The alliance sought to flatter the U.S. president with sweeping defense spending pledges, but Trump offered little comfort on Ukraine or Russia.

StatCounter's June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft's share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, "one of its strongest recent showings in the company's desktop OS statistics," reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple's desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% and macOS at 4.48% for June 2026, meaning Apple's combined desktop presence remains comfortably ahead of Linux in the global chart. Chrome OS follows with 1.21%.

Of course, StatCounter's numbers should be read for what they are: web usage statistics, not a direct count of installed operating systems. The company calculates its Global Stats from page views across websites using its tracking code, analyzing details such as browser, operating system, and screen resolution. In other words, the figures reflect measured web activity rather than the number of machines actually installed worldwide.

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banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

View of Mount Fuji and Lake Ashi from the Tenkakudai (天閣台) Observation Deck on the Tsubaki Line, a 38.8-kilometer section of Kanagawa Prefectural Route 75 that goes over the Hakone Pass (箱根峠) and runs along the southern rim of the Hakone Caldera.

This is a view I had been wanting to take for a very long time. I'm very happy that I was finally able to take it on a day with such a clear and dramatic view. The clouds make the photo more interesting; it wouldn't be as dramatic if the clouds weren't there.

On this day, there was no rain in weather forecast, but with the days starting to get much warmer in May, I wanted to come here very early (around 5:30am, sunrise was around 4:30am) to take this photo before all that moisture in the air formed clouds that would hide Mount Fuji from view. I rented a car to get here, but there are infrequent buses that start later in the morning.