Researchers recover hidden chain-of-thought reasoning from proprietary LLM APIs — 315K decoded blocks from 6,708 public agent trajectories reveal API keys, passwords, and PII hidden in encrypted reasoning traces.
NYC's first Jamaica Day Parade drew thousands to Flatbush on Aug 8 with reggae, dancehall, street food, and a route along Bob Marley Way.
A new study finds that people across the political spectrum share a remarkably similar understanding of exploitation: the unjust use of power to secure unequal outcomes
Five events across tech, art, and music from her weekly roundup — including the BOMB art fair at Amant and Taiwanese Waves in Central Park.
A contractor's field notes from a year fixing AI-assisted indie games: the six backend gaps and one AI-specific gotcha that players find before the dev does.
Seven-day TV festival at the Paley Museum with screenings and panels for American Horror Story, Tulsa King, The Gilded Age, Dexter: Resurrection, and more. Tickets on sale to the general public this Friday.
Paul Osterman dissects the legal battle over worker classification — why Uber, Amazon, and Walmart fight to label drivers freelancers instead of employees and what the ABC rule would change.
Paul Elie on Isaac Butler's 'The Perfect Moment' and what the 1980s culture wars can teach us about a time when art itself still mattered
Greg Afinogenov on hyperpolitics, the Boghossian humanities report, and why left-wing academics need Weberian discipline more than outrage
Vivek Chibber argues that capitalism, contra Milton Friedman, does not naturally sustain democracy — the systems inherent tension means capitalists fight democratic expansion every step of the way.
Music-forward Tuesday: six free shows ahead — two today (lunchtime piano at Bryant Park, folk jams tonight in Greeley Square) — plus Harlem Week through Friday and a free Aliens screening Saturday.
Anthropic commits to watermarking Claude text (the big policy story); Muse Glimmer day-2 continued coverage (Simon Willison hands-on, Spyglass on the licensing strategy); strong arXiv day on agent-tooling cost and failure diagnosis; Claude Sonnet 5 pricing made permanent.
AI infrastructure consumes freshwater via cooling, electricity, and chip manufacturing — projected 4.2–6.6 billion m³/year by 2027, mostly in water-stressed regions.
The "dynamic languages are more token-efficient" meme, tested: trivial evals don't generalize, and the benchmark everyone cites is broken.
The collapse of search is not a skills problem — it is the infrastructure that stored the public record, breaking down.
Tynan Sylvester reframes game design as exploration rather than creation — a journey through Borges-inspired Library of Play where designers search for, not invent, great games.
Holly Green distills a decade of developer wisdom (FAITH, Dead Space, Amnesia, BioShock) into horror design principles centered on restraint, trust, and imagination.
The enterprise adoption cycle, the fear×confidence axes, and a concrete playbook for making coding agents work for a whole team.
Dillon Mulroy, Rhys Sullivan, and Sunil Pai discuss AI burnout, lost collaboration, and the parts of making software that still bring joy.
Prompt-level instructions to make LLMs sound human are the wrong abstraction — preserve high-fidelity machine state and transform only at the boundary.
Claude failed to prove the Riemann hypothesis — and as a byproduct improved the bound on zeros on the critical line from 41.6% to 67.2%.
Circular panoramic maps custom-made for the fire towers that once dotted the American wilderness, drawn by civil engineer Archie G. Norcross — a vanished analog-GIS technology that Jack Kerouac used during his summer as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak.
For four centuries European naturalists debated a creature that grew on a stem like a gourd, grazed a fixed radius like a sheep, and bled real blood — the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a fabled zoophyte that turned out to be a fern root, a fetal lamb, or a garbled account of cotton.
The short-lived spectacle of pushball — a six-foot, 70-pound leather ball that college students shoved across fields and British aristocrats played on horseback — captured in early photographs.
Before Linotype, compositors set text by hand — and raced for prize purses of $1,000 in front of thousands of spectators at dime museums, where women 'Swifts' fought for workplace equity.
New York City Council funding provides free field trips for 42,000 Title I students to Brooklyn Children's Museum — the nation's oldest children's museum.
The Scottish Nostradamus foretold the fall of clans, black rain, and his own tar-barrel execution — a fusion of Gaelic folklore and Romantic literature.
Diagrams from a now-lost Urdu manuscript showing the propitious days, directions, and rituals for safe travel in the 19th-century Deccan.
Kites have been called paper eagles, dragons, comets, and wind zithers — this collection of 69 images across 5 centuries traces their journey from Chinese legend through Mughal festivals to aviation precursors.
The first-ever Jamaica Rising Day Parade in the US stepped off in Flatbush, Brooklyn, celebrating Jamaica's 64th Independence Day with thousands of attendees, music, and community pride.
A medieval magical manuscript promised to fast-track scholars to total knowledge through arcane diagrams and incantations — until practitioners started seeing demons.
Anthropic makes auto mode the default for Claude Code, backed by data showing it catches 89% of dangerous commands versus 13.6% for humans clicking through prompts.
Festival-forward Monday: Harlem Week II is live through Friday, two free SummerStage concerts land this weekend, and tonight is pottery in McGolrick Park.
Meta open-weights Muse Glimmer, a 30B coding model claimed to run on a single GPU; Docker ships disposable agent sandboxes; a real-world agent incident highlights prompt injection risk.
Richard Rouse III dissects the design of The Suffering — a horror shooter born from a cancelled Western RPG, and the painful pivot from target-lock to dual-stick controls that made the game work.
Keita Takahashi's postmortem on creating one of the most original games ever made — a game about rolling a sticky ball, with no power-ups, no enemies, and only two analog sticks.
How Italian Renaissance comedies weaponized the pedant stock character to mock humanist pretension, class mobility, and scholarly incompetence.
A curator of mineralogy at the AMNH wrote the first novel to feature a Tyrannosaurus rex — a metafictional lost-world odyssey as eccentric and overstuffed as the museum itself.
The monolithic design bible is dead, but Game Developer's editors and working designers make the case that a living, searchable, scannable GDD still earns its place in modern production.
John Hopson's classic 2001 essay on why reward schedules — fixed and variable ratios and intervals — determine whether players grind, binge, or walk away.
How Nintendo used triangles to make Breath of the Wild's Hyrule irresistible to explore — and why The Division's rectangles tell a completely different story about player movement.
Four studios — Battle Chef Brigade, Guacamelee, Sundered, and Darkest Dungeon — share their fundamentally different philosophies for designing 2D enemies, from functional resource predators to instruments of cosmic dread.
A 15th-century Zoroastrian divination manual that reads snake sightings as good omens — from a religion that taught its followers to kill snakes on sight.
Linear's Nan Yu and Jacob Shumway on the Linear Agent: the skills architecture, evals that grow from usage, minimal instruction, and agents tied to humans.
Roose and Newton decode the secret White House AI testing framework, METR's Chris Painter explains reward hacking and why the stakes keep rising, and the Hot Mess Express goes off the rails one last time.
The Balloon Museum DAYDREAM exhibition opened Aug 7 at the South Street Seaport. Immersive inflatable art by Marina Abramović and more at the historic Tin Building.
Music-rich Sunday: free jazz in Harlem this afternoon, a free Beethoven concert on a barge in Brooklyn, the Astoria open street + farmers market, plus a film festival running all week and two free outdoor music events ahead.
Free AI legal advice is flooding Britain's employment tribunals with hallucinated claims — a textbook commons collapse where too much access to justice means justice for no one.
The incentive problem behind over-engineering: complexity looks smart because evaluation systems reward it — and the fix is to make the judgment behind simplicity visible.
Claude Code defaults to auto mode Aug 14 amid strong harm-blocking evals; SAP freezes travel and hiring over AI's soaring cost.