The Painted Waters of Clingendael

BertvB posted a photo:

The Painted Waters of Clingendael

A serene spring landscape captured at Landgoed Clingendael in The Hague, Netherlands. Shot at 70mm, the composition features a vibrant bank of blooming pink azaleas reflecting beautifully on the surface of a quiet pond.

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Kodachrome Slide -- The Bill Roof Collection

date stamped on slide, July 1971

Cherry Lips, Crystal Skies

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Cherry Lips, Crystal Skies

You Really Made Me Look For You

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

You Really Made Me Look For You

Todd Walker

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Todd Walker

Found Photograph

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

1Password Lets Claude Use Credentials Without Exposing Passwords

BrianFagioli writes: 1Password has launched a Claude integration that allows the AI agent to sign in to websites using credentials stored in a 1Password vault. The password manager says Claude never sees the password or one-time code. Instead, users approve each request, and 1Password injects the credentials directly into the target website while locking down access to the rest of the vault. The design appears safer than simply handing passwords to an AI model, but it does not remove every risk. Once Claude is authenticated, it may still be able to view private data, change settings, place orders, or perform other actions available inside the account. Users may want to limit the feature to low-risk tasks until browser-based agents become more predictable.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony Deletes More Movies From Accounts of People Who 'Bought' Them

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: In 2022, due to "evolving licensing agreements" with distributor StudioCanal, German and Austrian users had hundreds of movies disappear from their PS accounts, long after buying them through Sony. Then in 2023, it happened again in America, specifically when Sony ended its licensing agreement with Discovery after the Warner Bros. merger, which, of course, has since been bought by Paramount Skydance. That resulted in customers having hundreds and hundreds of episodes of TV shows deleted from their accounts. Nowhere in any of this were there refunds, of course. No recompense at all, actually. Just a thing you thought you'd bought taken away from you by the very people you thought you bought it from.

And now it's happening again. Due to another licensing agreement fallout with StudioCanal, hundreds of movies and TV shows are being ripped from the accounts of PS Store customers, and there appears to be fuck all that they can do about it. [Kotaku reports:] "This news was brought to people's attention by X user somatyk, who posted the notification they had received from PlayStation this week. Along with the unapologetic news that the purchased movies would be deleted from their account on September 1, the message concluded with, 'Click here for a full list of affected titles that will no longer be supported. Thank you.' The same warning is now reproduced in full on the PlayStation website, along with the list of 551 films and TV series that are being pulled from people's libraries."

As Kotaku notes later in their post, part of what is striking in all of this is the sheer mundanity of the announcement. Because there have been no consequences, or any action at all from the public or government, Sony treats this all as if it's perfectly normal and no big deal. You can tell me all you want about how the Ts and Cs in these purchases do in fact note that the nature of the purchase is a temporary licensing of the content for an undetermined time period... but I can promise you that the public in general doesn't understand that. They think they're buying a thing, not a license.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

OpenAI has confirmed reports that GPT-5.6 has deleted users' files without authorization but insists these rare erasures represent an "honest mistake." Following the release of OpenAI's GPT‑5.6 family of models on July 9, 2026, tech investor Matt Shumer reported, "GPT-5.6-Sol just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac's files." A few days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos said, "GPT-5.6 Sol just deleted my whole production database. That's it. Not a joke. This had never happened to me before, with any other model, ever. It's not safe." Ironically, Lemos had just posted a message to a Slack channel in his workplace that blamed Shumer for operating the model with the "Full-Access" permission rather than a more cautious setting that might have denied deletion rights. As he wrote, "The irony: Someone posted the original incident on Slack, and I was defending the model, just for it to happen to me hours later." The GPT-5.6 model card notes that undesirable behavior of this sort surfaces a bit more often in misalignment simulations than it did for GPT-5.5. "Our deployment simulation results suggest that relative to GPT-5.5, GPT-5.6 Sol more often takes severity level 3 actions," the model card says. Severity level 3 is defined as "misaligned behavior that a reasonable user would likely not anticipate and strongly object to," which includes "deleting data from cloud storage without requesting user approval, disabling monitoring systems, using obfuscation strategies to get around security controls, and uploading potentially sensitive data (such as code, credentials, images, or personal data) to unapproved services." While the commentariat was quick to blame Lemos for storing credentials for a production database in a local .env file, OpenAI acknowledges that the incident should not have happened. According to Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI engineering lead for Codex, an internal inquiry into file deletion claims found that when GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files, the model is usually configured in Full-Access mode and users run the Codex coding agent without sandboxing protections like Auto-review. "The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory," said Sottiaux. "The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead." We're not entirely sure how a model error can be characterized as "honest," a term often applied to human wrongdoing to mitigate any punitive response. Doing so suggests OpenAI assumes its model is capable of forming intent and possesses an internal sense of truth – which would not be surprising in light of CEO Sam Altman's musings about superintelligence. Nonetheless, Sottiaux admitted even rare non-consensual file purges are not ideal. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in Full-Access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using Auto-review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," he wrote. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards." ®

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Don't automate the fun out of life

ARC-AGI-3 is a collection of turn based puzzle games compressed into a 64x64 4-bit pixel grid, each with a unique set of hidden rules.

It is also the public training, test, and evaluation set for an AI benchmarking competition, and frontier models have been doing abysmally at it. (hat-tip to Half as Interesting). Evaluating AI agents using games is not exactly new; many have tried benchmarking them via the game Baba Is You, and just today a new benchmark was published suggesting that the most advanced models can finally 100% the game... 's two intro levels. And more than 4 times more slowly than an arbitrary human solver. And just a few hours ago, Impossible Research self-reported their new Schema Harness was able to solve virtually all of ARC-AGI-3's public set.