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OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research

OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research.

That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions.

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Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user's viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law's definition of the word "consumer." Salazar filed a class action against Paramount in 2022, alleging that it "violated the VPPA by disclosing his personally identifiable information to Facebook without consent," Salazar's petition to the Supreme Court said. Salazar had signed up for an online newsletter through 247Sports.com, a site owned by Paramount, and had to provide his email address in the process. Salazar then used 247Sports.com to view videos while logged in to his Facebook account.

"As a result, Paramount disclosed his personally identifiable information -- including his Facebook ID and which videos he watched—to Facebook," the petition (PDF) said. "The disclosures occurred automatically because of the Facebook Pixel Paramount installed on its website. Facebook and Paramount then used this information to create and display targeted advertising, which increased their revenues." The 1988 law (PDF) defines consumer as "any renter, purchaser, or subscriber of goods or services from a video tape service provider." The phrase "video tape service provider" is defined to include providers of "prerecorded video cassette tapes or similar audio visual materials," and thus arguably applies to more than just sellers of tapes.

The legal question for the Supreme Court "is whether the phrase 'goods or services from a video tape service provider,' as used in the VPPA's definition of 'consumer,' refers to all of a video tape service provider's goods or services or only to its audiovisual goods or services," Salazar's petition said. The Supreme Court granted his petition (PDF) to hear the case in a list of orders released yesterday. [...] SCOTUSblog says that "the case will likely be scheduled for oral argument in the court's 2026-27 term," which begins in October 2026.

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Amazon To Pay $309 Million To US Shoppers In Settlement Over Returns

Amazon has agreed to pay $309 million and provide additional remedies in a class-action settlement over claims that customers were wrongly denied refunds after returning items. Plaintiffs say (PDF) the deal delivers over $1 billion in total value, including more than $600 million in refunds and operational changes. Reuters reports: Amazon denied any wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement. "Following an internal review in 2025, we identified a small subset of returns where we issued a refund without the payment completing, or where we could not verify that the correct item had been sent back to us, so no refund had been issued," an Amazon spokesperson said, adding that the company had taken steps to resolve the issue.

The lawsuit, filed in 2023, said Amazon caused "substantial unjustified monetary losses" for consumers who in some instances properly returned an item but were still charged for it. In a court filing, Amazon said customers accepted the terms of the company's return policies, including the possibility they would be recharged for failing to return the product within a specified time frame. The proposed settlement class covers U.S. purchasers of goods on Amazon from September 2017 who allegedly did not receive timely or correct refunds, or who were later charged despite returning items. Class members are expected to recover the full amount of any incorrectly denied refund or retrocharge, plus interest, the plaintiffs told the court.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them 'Reinvent Themselves'

Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers "reinvent themselves" before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living.

The $205 billion bank sent out an internal memo last year requiring staffers to learn prompting skills specifically. Fraser told the Washington Post at Davos that AI "will change the nature of what people do every day" and "will take some jobs away." The adaptive training platform lets experts complete the course in under 10 minutes while beginners need about 30 minutes. Citi reported last year that employees had entered more than 6.5 million prompts into its built-in AI tools, and Q4 2025 data shows a 70% adoption rate for the bank's proprietary AI tools.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Internal Messages May Doom Meta At Social Media Addiction Trial

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit -- considered a "bellwether" case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints -- goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological harm by designing features like infinite scroll and autoplay to push her down a path that she alleged triggered depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicidality. TikTok and Snapchat were also targeted by the lawsuit, but both have settled. The Snapchat settlement came last week, while TikTok settled on Tuesday just hours before the trial started, Bloomberg reported. For now, YouTube and Meta remain in the fight. K.G.M. allegedly started watching YouTube when she was 6 years old and joined Instagram by age 11. She's fighting to claim untold damages -- including potentially punitive damages -- to help her family recoup losses from her pain and suffering and to punish social media companies and deter them from promoting harmful features to kids. She also wants the court to require prominent safety warnings on platforms to help parents be aware of the risks. [...]

To win, K.G.M.'s lawyers will need to "parcel out" how much harm is attributed to each platform, due to design features, not the content that was targeted to K.G.M., Clay Calvert, a technology policy expert and senior fellow at a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute, wrote. Internet law expert Eric Goldman told The Washington Post that detailing those harms will likely be K.G.M.'s biggest struggle, since social media addiction has yet to be legally recognized, and tracing who caused what harms may not be straightforward. However, Matthew Bergman, founder of the Social Media Victims Law Center and one of K.G.M.'s lawyers, told the Post that K.G.M. is prepared to put up this fight. "She is going to be able to explain in a very real sense what social media did to her over the course of her life and how in so many ways it robbed her of her childhood and her adolescence," Bergman said.

The research is unclear on whether social media is harmful for kids or whether social media addiction exists, Tamar Mendelson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told the Post. And so far, research only shows a correlation between Internet use and mental health, Mendelson noted, which could doom K.G.M.'s case and others.' However, social media companies' internal research might concern a jury, Bergman told the Post. On Monday, the Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit working to rein in Big Tech, published a report analyzing recently unsealed documents in K.G.M.'s case that supposedly provide "smoking-gun evidence" that platforms "purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing" -- while putting increased engagement from young users at the center of their business models. Most of the unsealed documents came from Meta. An internal email shows Mark Zuckerberg decided Meta's top strategic priority was getting teens "locked in" to Meta's family of apps. Another damning document discusses allowing "tweens" to use a private mode inspired by fake Instagram accounts ("finstas"). The same document includes an admission that internal data showed Facebook use correlated with lower well-being.

Internal communications showed Meta seemingly bragging that "teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to" and an employee declaring, "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug," likening all social media platforms to "pushers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is Building an AI 'Rebel Alliance' To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic

Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser that has spent two decades battling tech giants over control of the internet, is now turning its attention to AI and deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to fund what president Mark Surman calls a "rebel alliance" of startups focused on AI safety, transparency and governance.

The organization released a report Tuesday outlining its strategy to counter the growing dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, which have raised more than $60 billion and $30 billion respectively from investors and now command valuations of $500 billion and $350 billion. Mozilla Ventures, a fund launched in 2022 with an initial $35 million commitment, has invested in more than 55 companies to date and is exploring raising additional capital.

Surman, who runs the organization from a farm outside Toronto, acknowledged the financial mismatch but said Mozilla is playing the long game. By 2028, he wants Mozilla to be funding a "mainstream" open-source AI ecosystem for developers. The effort faces headwinds from the Trump administration, which has criticized AI safety efforts as "woke AI" and signed an executive order establishing a task force to challenge state AI regulations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

A Codeless Ecosystem, or hacking beyond vibe coding

There's been a remarkable leap forward in the ability to orchestrate coding bots, making it possible for ordinary creators to command dozens of AI bots to build software without ever having to directly touch code. The implications of this kind of evolution are potentially extraordinary, as outlined in that first set of notes about what we could call "codeless" software. But now it's worth looking at the larger ecosystem to understand where all of this might be headed.

"Frontier minus six"

One idea that's come up in a host of different conversations around codeless software, both from supporters and skeptics, is how these new orchestration tools can enable coders to control coding bots that aren't from the Big AI companies. Skeptics say, "won't everyone just use Claude Code, since that's the best coding bot?"

The response that comes up is one that I keep articulating as "frontier minus six", meaning the idea that many of the open source or open-weight AI models are often delivering results at a level equivalent to where frontier AI models were six months ago. Or, sometimes, where they were 9 months or a year ago. In any of these cases, these are still damn good results! These levels of performance are not merely acceptable, they are results that we were amazed by just months ago, and are more than serviceable for a large number of use cases — especially if those use cases can be run locally, at low cost, with lower power usage, without having to pay any vendor, and in environments where one can inspect what's happening with security and privacy.

When we consider that a frontier-minus-six fleet of bots can often run on cheap commodity hardware (instead of the latest, most costly, hard-to-get Nvidia GPUs) and we still have the backup option of escalating workloads to the paid services if and when a task is too challenging for them to complete, it seems inevitable that this will be part of the mix in future codeless implementations.

Agent patterns and design

The most thoughtful and fluent analysis of the new codeless approach has been this wonderful essay by Maggie Appleton, whose writing is always incisive and insightful. This one's a must-read! Speaking of Gas Town (Steve Yegge's signature orchestration tool, which has catalyzed much of the codeless revolution), Maggie captures the ethos of the entire space:

We should take Yegge’s creation seriously not because it’s a serious, working tool for today’s developers (it isn’t). But because it’s a good piece of speculative design fiction that asks provocative questions and reveals the shape of constraints we’ll face as agentic coding systems mature and grow.

Code and legacy

Once you've considered Maggie's piece, it's worth reading over Steve Krouse's essay, "Vibe code is legacy code". Steve and his team build the delightful val town, an incredibly accessible coding community that strikes a very careful balance between enabling coding and enabling AI assistance without overwriting the human, creative aspects of building with code. In many ways (including its aesthetic), it is the closest thing I've seen to a spiritual successor to the work we'd done for many years with Glitch, so it's no surprise that Steve would have a good intuition about the human relationship to creating with code.

There's an interesting point, however to the core point Steve makes about the disposability of vibe-coded (or AI-generated) code: all code is disposable. Every single line of code I wrote during the many years I was a professional developer has since been discarded. And it's not just because I was a singularly terrible coder; this is often the normal thing that happens with code bases after just a short period of time. As much as we lament the longevity of legacy code bases, or the impossibility of fixing some stubborn old systems based on dusty old languages, it's also very frequently the case that people happily rip out massive chunks of code that people toiled over for months or years and then discard it all without any sentimentality whatsoever.

Codeless tooling just happens to embrace this ephemerality and treat it as a feature instead of a bug. That kind of inversion of assumptions often leads to interesting innovations.

To enterprise or not

As I noted in my original piece on codeless software, we can expect any successful way of building software to be appropriated by companies that want to profiteer off of the technology, especially enterprise companies. This new realm is no different. Because these codeless orchestration systems have been percolating for some time, we've seen some of these efforts pop up already.

For example, the team at Every, which consults and builds tools around AI for businesses, calls a lot of these approaches compound engineering when their team uses them to create software. This name seems fine, and it's good to see that they maintain the ability to switch between models easily, even if they currently prefer Claude's Opus 4.5 for most of their work. The focus on planning and thinking through the end product holistically is a particularly important point to emphasize, and will be key to this approach succeeding as new organizations adopt it.

But where I'd quibble with some of what they've explained is the focus on tying the work to individual vendors. Those concerns should be abstracted away by those who are implementing the infrastructure, as much as possible. It's a bit like ensuring that most individual coders don't have to know exactly which optimizations a compiler is making when it targets a particular CPU architecture. Building that muscle where the specifics of different AI vendors become less important will help move the industry forward towards reducing platforms costs — and more importantly, empowering coders to make choices based on their priorities, not those of the AI platforms or their bosses.

Meeting the codeless moment

A good example of the "normal" developer ecosystem recognizing the groundswell around codeless workflows and moving quickly to integrate with them is the Tailscale team already shipping Aperture. While this initial release is focused on routine tasks like managing API keys, it's really easy to see how the ability to manage gateways and usage into a heterogeneous mix of coding agents will start to enable, and encourage, adoption of new coding agents. (Especially if those "frontier-minus-six" scenarios start to take off.)

I've been on the record for years about being bullish on Tailscale, and nimbleness like this is a big reason why. That example of seeing where developers are going, and then building tooling to serve them, is always a sign that something is bubbling up that could actually become signficant.

It's still early, but these are the first few signs of a nascent ecosystem that give me more conviction that this whole thing might become real.

The Guardian

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French former senator found guilty of drugging MP with intent to sexually assault her

Joël Guerriau sentenced to four years in prison after spiking lawmaker’s champagne with ecstasy

A French court has found a former senator guilty of drugging a female lawmaker with ecstasy with intent to sexually assault her.

Joël Guerriau, 68, was sentenced to four years in prison on Tuesday, of which 18 months must be behind bars.

In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support for rape and sexual abuse on 0808 802 9999 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html

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Gelatinous horde of red stinging jellyfish washes into Melbourne beaches

A ‘massive smack’ of lion’s mane jellyfish has appeared across Port Phillip Bay, but experts say fears of a ‘jellygeddon’ are overblown

Swimmers have been advised to steer clear if they see red jellies in the water after a gelatinous horde descended on Melbourne beaches.

Thousands of lion’s mane jellyfish have washed into the shallows and on to the sand across Port Phillip Bay, from Altona in the west to Blairgowrie on the Mornington Peninsula.

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Keir Starmer walks tightrope over myriad issues in quest to bolster China ties

Vow to bring ‘stability and clarity’ to the UK’s approach to Beijing on first visit by a British prime minister in eight years will be sorely tested

Keir Starmer has travelled to China with a vow to bring “stability and clarity” to the UK’s approach to Beijing after years of what he described as “inconsistency” under the Tories, but a series of issues may get in the way of his efforts to improve relations with the economic powerhouse.

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Judge strikes down Virginia Democrats’ plan to redraw congressional districts

Ruling is a setback for Democrats looking to increase number of seats in midterm House elections in November

A Virginia judge ruled on Tuesday that a proposed constitutional amendment letting Democrats redraw the state’s congressional maps was illegal, setting back the party’s efforts to pick up seats in the US House in November.

Tazewell circuit court judge Jack Hurley Jr struck down the legislature’s actions on three grounds, including finding that lawmakers failed to follow their own rules for adding the redistricting amendment to a special session.

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Meta allowed minors access to sex-talking chatbots despite staff concerns, lawsuit alleges

Filing by New Mexico’s attorney general includes Meta staff emails objecting to AI companion policy

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, approved allowing minors to access artificial intelligence chatbot companions that safety staffers warned were capable of sexual interactions, according to internal Meta documents filed in a New Mexico state court case and made public on Monday.

The lawsuit – brought by the state’s attorney general, Raul Torrez, and scheduled for trial next month – alleges Meta “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children” on Facebook and Instagram.

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Starmer vows to remain ‘clear-eyed’ over national security as he flies to China

PM promises ‘stability and clarity’ in approach on first visit to Beijing by UK leader in eight years

Keir Starmer has said the UK government will remain “clear-eyed and realistic” on the national security threat posed by China as he travelled to Beijing in an effort to improve relations with the economic powerhouse.

The prime minister promised “stability and clarity” in his approach to Beijing after years of what he described as “inconsistency” under the Tories, as western powers turn to China in their search for economic stability amid concerns the US may no longer be a reliable partner.

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Russian drone strike on Ukrainian passenger train kills five

Attack in Kharkiv region was denounced as terrorism by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said it undermined ‘efforts to end the war’

A Russian drone strike on a passenger train in north-eastern Ukraine has killed five people, prosecutors said, an attack denounced as terrorism by president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Prosecutors said fragments of five bodies had been found at the scene of the strike on the train, which occurred on Tuesday near a village in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region.

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Colossal

The best of art, craft, and visual culture since 2010.

Dabin Ahn Lingers in Loss in a Mournful Series of Sculptural Paintings

Dabin Ahn Lingers in Loss in a Mournful Series of Sculptural Paintings

Dabin Ahn has always been interested in the way objects and materials become markers of life. The Chicago-based artist renders delicate vessels, pottery shards, and taper candles with warm wax pooled underneath small flames. Nested in hand-crafted wooden frames, his sculptural paintings are luminous meditations on the passage of time and what remains over the years.

What’s lingering for Ahn at the moment are memories of his father, who died earlier this month. Just as the artist was wrapping up preparations for his solo show at François Ghebaly, he received a call from his brother saying he needed to return to Seoul to say goodbye. Ahn’s father had been sick for a while, and while much of the work in Golden Days reflects this grief and impending loss, the paintings are much more reflective of his father’s death.

a painting by Dabin Ahn of a barely visible vessel on a wooden shelf with eyeglasses, a watch, and a piece of white paper
“Repose” (2025), oil on linen and walnut, 19 x 13 inches

“Throughout the process of preparing for this show, I was mostly thinking about, not my life without my dad, but taking myself back to the 90s, when we were most happy as a family,” the artist told Colossal. In deep blues and grays, much of Ahn’s work is veiled in a sort of meditative melancholy, one that comes through processing grief and loss over a long period of time. Candles, fireflies, and gleaming vessels appear as beacons among the somber color palettes.

Works like “Flora and Fauna II” and “Repose” feature vases fading in the background, a clear metaphor for his late father. The weave of the linen itself also peeks through the scratchy surface of the paintings, which the artist rubbed with sandpaper to achieve the grainy, worn texture.

While Ahn is known to meticulously follow what he’s referred to as a “script” in creating a piece, this body of work is more amenable to nature’s forces as burled wood frames and craggy turquoise assert their textures. Golden Days also gives more space for the materials’ histories and the patina of various objects to shine, a choice echoed in the artist’s own actions. “I still feel my dad’s presence,” he says. “I brought back his old watches and his glasses, which I started wearing. I changed the lenses so that I can wear them, so I’m still living with him in a way.”

Golden Days is on view through February 14 in Los Angeles, and Ahn has another solo exhibition upcoming this spring at Document in Chicago. Until then, find more on Instagram.

a painting by Dabin Ahn that cuts open in the middle to reveal a fragmented image of a taper candle. the work is in a wooden frame that's slightly askew
“Ephemeral (Nocturne)” (2025), oil on linen over panel, mother of pearl inlay, turquoise, brass, cast resin, in artist’s frame, 17 x 12 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a pottery sherd
“Warmth” (2025), oil on linen in artist frame, 15 x 9.75 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a white vessel in a wooden frame with a cutout revealing a lightning bug
“Flora and Fauna” (2025), oil on linen in artist’s frame, 18.5 x 14 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a fragmented white vessel in a wooden frame
“Flora and Fauna II” (2025), oil on linen in artist’s frame, 18.5 x 13.5 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a red vessel in a wooden frame with a cutout revealing a lit taper candle
“Golden Days II” (2025), oil on linen in artist’s frame, 15.5 x 9.5 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a broken vessel that's dissolving with a frame that's curling upward
“Home” (2025), oil on linen in artist’s frame, 18 x 13 inches
a painting by Dabin Ahn of a delicate vessel in a wooden frame with a cutout on the top right corner
Installation view of “Ephemeral II” (2025), oil on turquoise, brass, adhesive, walnut, 16 x 2.5 x 2.5 inches

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Dabin Ahn Lingers in Loss in a Mournful Series of Sculptural Paintings appeared first on Colossal.

The Register

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

Paranoid WhatsApp users rejoice: Encrypted app gets one-click privacy toggle

Meta also replaces a legacy C++ media-handling security library with Rust

Users of Meta's WhatsApp messenger looking to simplify the process of protecting themselves are in luck, as the company is rolling out a new feature that combines multiple security settings under a single, toggleable option. …

D66, VVD en CDA hebben een regeerakkoord: ‘We hebben ontzettend veel zin om samen te werken’

D66, VVD en CDA zijn eruit over ‘alle grote onderwerpen’ van het regeerakkoord. Er moeten alleen nog ‘puntjes op de i’, zegt aanstaand premier Rob Jetten. Vrijdag wordt het akkoord gepresenteerd.

The Wiltern

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The Wiltern