Ben Sprecher @bensprecher

Super cool to see "dead end" concepts from my AI classes from ~30 years ago coming back to life through amazing work like this by @SakanaAILabs

Sakana AI @SakanaAILabs

2 days ago

Introducing "Diffusing Blame": can a neural network learn competitively while strictly obeying Dale's principle, the rule that real neurons follow? We show it can, across both image classification and reinforcement learning. 🧠 Accepted at #ALIFE2026 arxiv.org/abs/2606.31700

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Putin Last night Donald Trump released a declassified document that says his own intelligence community identified Putin as personally running an operation to defeat my father in 2020, built around a fake Burisma corruption scandal centered around me and executed through prominent Americans. Trump tasked his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to fly to Kyiv and meet a known Russian agent. The Americans who ran, laundered, and legitimized the operation: Donald Trump. Rudy Giuliani. John Solomon. Joe DiGenova. Victoria Toensing. Lev Parnas. Igor Fruman. Chanel Rion. Sean Hannity. Steve Bannon. Miranda Devine. Ken Vogel. Ron Johnson. Chuck Grassley. James Comer. Jim Jordan. To name a few. An operation formally sanctioned by Trump's own Treasury Department on September 10, 2020, and expanded to include more named actors on January 11, 2021. Oh, and don't forget the Russian-linked FBI informant Alexander Smirnov, who later pleaded guilty to making the entire Burisma bribery story up. The record exists and we have all the receipts, and more.

Why does my feed keep switching back to "For You"? I immediately feel myself getting angrier when scrolling, and realize I must not be on my "Following" view. Seems like a pretty toxic tell.

HASSAN: If RFK Jr ordered you to stop promoting the flu vaccine during a deadly flu season, would you? SCHWARTZ: We have to prioritize what we can focus on-- HASSAN: This isn't a hypothetical. RFK Jr in the middle of a deadly flu outbreak directed the CDC to stop all promotion of the flu vaccine. So would you stop promoting it if ordered to? SCHWARTZ: I don't speak in hypotheticals-- HASSAN: This isn't a hypothetical! It happened

🚨 Florida police tackled and broke a 15-year-old Black teen’s arm while searching for a white runaway they had just seen in a photo. Judah Everage was on his knees with his hands in the air when officers slammed him to the ground near Wickham Park in Melbourne. He wasn’t the person they were looking for, but they still fractured his elbow. Body camera footage shows he was complying the entire time. One officer has since resigned, but the others involved are still on the job. This is what happens when police treat Black kids as suspects first and ask questions later. Disgusting. Sources: Body camera footage / Local reporting

Vibecoder's keyboard

Police body slam woman peacefully protesting ICE—give her concussion. "I was targeted," she said. "Made example of so more 'loud mouth' protesters like me would stop showing up." 2 officers throw her to ground and land on top of her—so hard she needs treatment for concussion. Annya Mari is well known for protesting ICE for the past 20 years with no criminal record—until now. She has now been charged with "harassment of a public official." Incident occurred outside the ICE facility in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents are now kidnapping Native grandmothers in Chaparral, New Mexico. A Native woman pulled into a gas station because she realized she was being followed by a truck. Moments later, ICE agents surrounded her and escorted her to one of their vehicles. This is a woman whose ancestors lived on this land for thousands of years before the United States even existed. A Native woman, on her own ancestral land, being treated like a foreigner by the federal government in 2026. The Fourth Amendment protects people from being unreasonably stopped or detained, and the federal government cannot lawfully target people simply because of their race or ethnicity. So why did ICE agents stalk and kidnap this woman? This stopped being about immigration a long time ago.

🚨BREAKING: ICE agents were filmed assaulting, handcuffing, and kidnapping a U.S. citizen in Passaic, New Jersey… while refusing to even look at the ID he repeatedly begged them to check. A man is pleading with federal agents to verify who he is… And they refused. Instead, one agent says, “We need to get him on the ground,” puts him in a chokehold, throws him to the ground, and multiple agents pile on top of him before handcuffing him, and throwing him into their vehicle. Under the Fourth Amendment, the government cannot arrest, or seize someone, without probable cause that they have committed, are committing, or are about to commit an offense that authorizes the arrest. U.S. citizens are also not required to carry identification unless they’re driving a motorized vehicle. And if federal agents are refusing to verify someone’s identity before arresting them, then they are openly ignoring the constitution. Which should terrify every American. Because that means no one is safe from being kidnapped by the government… and disappeared. Every agent involved should be publicly identified, and DHS should be forced to explain why they believed they had the legal authority to seize someone, while refusing to verify who he was. This cannot become normal.

@karpathy @btaylor That cuts deep.

Important

Demis Hassabis @demishassabis

5 days ago

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Absolute barbarism. russia dropped a 3-ton aerial bomb on residential buildings in Orikhiv, Zaporizhzhia region. If this isn't terrorism, what is?

BREAKING: Federal judge finds that Trump's IRS suit was improper because Trump controlled both sides of the litigation. Judge Kathleen Williams also sanctions Trump's lawyers, issues monetary sanctions, and harshly criticizes DOJ's "untenable" conduct. More to come at Law Dork: lawdork.com

@SakanaAILabs @jeffclune @kenneth0stanley did you guys work on this too?

The AI Picbreeder Experiment: Can AI agents be creative when nobody tells them what to create? Blog: pub.sakana.ai/picbreeder-vlm In our new #GECCO2026 paper, "In Search of the Ingredients of Open-Endedness: Replicating Picbreeder with Large Vision-Language Models", in collaboration with MIT and NYU, we revisit Picbreeder, a lost website where people collaboratively evolved images without any predefined objective. Users simply selected images they found interesting, allowing unexpected forms such as faces, animals, vehicles, and skulls to emerge gradually across many generations and many different people. We recreated this process using vision-language model agents. The agents explore a shared archive, choose images to branch from, evolve new candidates, publish their favorites, and evaluate the creations of other agents. There is no target image and no explicit definition of what counts as progress. The results reveal both the promise and current limitations of AI-driven open-ended discovery. Compared with humans, VLM agents tend to keep circling back to the same kinds of images and concepts. They repeatedly select similar parents, make smaller conceptual leaps, and often refine an existing idea rather than abandoning it in search of something genuinely unexpected. However, introducing a diverse population of agent personalities substantially improves exploration. In some runs, diverse agent populations approached or matched the human archive on measures of semantic diversity and produced more balanced evolutionary trees. We also find intriguing evidence that open-ended evolution can produce more robust representations. A skull evolved by the agents changes smoothly when its underlying neural representation is perturbed, less fractured than a skull directly optimized with gradient descent, although still less cleanly disentangled than one evolved collectively by humans. But perhaps the most interesting result is the gap that remains. Humans appear better at turning fortunate accidents into sustained creative discoveries: recognizing when something unexpected is worth pursuing, refining it, and then making a larger conceptual leap. The AI agents often notice interesting patterns too, but are more likely to become trapped in them. We still do not fully understand what enables humans to navigate open-ended search in this way, or what ingredient(s) current AI systems are missing. For now, the results suggest that there remains something important about human creativity that AI agents have not yet learned to reproduce. This paper will be presented at #GECCO2026 and is nominated for a best paper award! Please check out the interactive blog and technical paper for more details! Read our full paper: arxiv.org/abs/2605.23908 🐟

@RaminNasibov Lower seat density -> lower revenue/flight vs ~fixed costs (fuel, financing, crew, maintenance) -> lower profits

Reports that the White House has dismissed the remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission — all of whom were unanimously confirmed by the Senate, including a commissioner appointed by President Trump himself — should concern every American, regardless of party, because the EAC was established by Congress as an independent, bipartisan body to help states administer secure and credible elections. If these reports are accurate, removing every remaining commissioner just months before the 2026 midterm elections is an extraordinary step that demands an immediate explanation from the administration and raises profound concerns about political interference in the institutions that support our elections.

I got 6/6 in 34.3s on TongueTied Daily #1. Can you do better? 🟩 EN 🟩 ES 🟩 FR 🟩 NL 🟩 HE 🟩 IT tonguetied.app/daily

@joshwoodward @demishassabis @GeminiApp Create and edit excellent Sheets, Docs, and Slides. @GoogleWorkspace apps should have first class Gemini support.

Judge Kaplan: “In the last analysis, defendant has been stalling this case for years. A jury unanimously concluded that he sexually abused and defamed plaintiff and awarded her damages accordingly. The judgment on that verdict has been upheld on appeal. En bane rehearing has been denied. The Supreme Court has denied certiorari without dissent. It is time for him to "do equity" and pay the judgment.”

Adam Klasfeld @KlasfeldReports

2 weeks ago

Trump “has been stalling this case for years,” and it’s “time for him to ‘do equity’ and pay the judgment,” a federal judge writes regarding E. Jean Carroll.

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