David Greybeard, a wild chimpanzee, gets a handout of bananas from author Goodall, who studies the apes under a National Geographic Society grant. This scene near her camp represents a triumph for Miss Goodall; at first the animals fled if she came within 500 yards. Knapsack holds camera and notebook. She carries a whistle in her pocket to summon searchers in case of accident in the rugged Tanganyika hills.

Had never read Jane Goodall's original 1963 article in Nat Geo on the wild chimpanzees in Tanzania until now. It's a wonderful blend of science and journalism, and well worth your time.

www.nationalgeographic.com/pdf/jane-goo...

EU–INC is the single best thing Europe could do to catch-up in the AI race

A simple unified pan-European startup structure, with modern employee ownership and simple access to capital, able to tap into Europe’s full talent pool.

‼️ but it’s at high risk of not seeing the light of day. You can help👇

A cool use of AI in newsgathering, this. US companies are talking more and more about the risks rather than the benefits of AI in their SEC filings (while still being super-optimistic in earnings calls). By @melissahei.bsky.social @chriscook.news & @claradoodle.bsky.social www.ft.com/content/e93e...

Andor would want you to cancel your Disney+ subscription.

It's the least you can do for the Rebellion.

An update on this: I've confirmed that "gpt-realtime has a mix of data specific enough to itself that its not really 4o or 5" - see quote from OpenAI at bottom of simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/1/i...

I was interviewed in the Financial Times about "the perils of vibe coding", and it made it into the print edition! simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/29/...

Big news - Anthropic agrees to settle with authors in copyright lawsuit.

As tech bros like to say, ‘we’re only just getting started’.

www.reuters.com/sustainabili...

Leaked Memo: Anthropic CEO Says the Company Will Pursue Gulf State Investments After All “Unfortunately, I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” wrote Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in a note to staff obtained by WIRE...

“It’s perfectly consistent to advocate for a policy of ‘No one is allowed to do x,’ but then if that policy fails and everyone else does X, to reluctantly do x ourselves.” 🤔

X=help dictators

www.wired.com/story/anthro...

A link to the Bulgarian model, in case somebody is interested - huggingface.co/HPLT/hplt_be...

That was my theory going into the piece, but it turned out to be not only false but seemingly the opposite: the biggest employment gains young male grads have made in the past year have been in software and engineering jobs

Hah, missed this that other say

Elon: "It is surprisingly hard to avoid both woke libtard cuck and mechahitler!"

(Narrator: this was not surprising at all)

That's fun!

Advertising, with guardrails and healthy metrics, funds a healthy media ecosystem.

Hoping Bluesky shines, and the cesspool, X, sinks to the bottom - The Boston Globe Bluesky, a relatively new social media platform in the mold of what's now Elon Musk's site, is prioritizing sports content to grow.

Sunday media. www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/12/s...

A very good, and rather sad, Big Read on children and reading from @emmavj.bsky.social

on.ft.com/4krOKZA How to get children reading again

ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines | TechCrunch Not surprisingly, organic traffic has also declined, dropping from over 2.3 billion visits at its peak in mid-2024 to now under 1.7 billion.

ChatGPT referrals to news sites are growing, but not enough to offset search declines

‼️Sentence Transformers v5.0 is out! The biggest update yet introduces Sparse Embedding models, encode methods improvements, Router module for asymmetric models & much more. Sparse + Dense = 🔥 hybrid search performance!

Details in 🧵

Wild.

At no point in this study did I use AI. This includes the literature review, logical organization, writing, analysis, and proofreading. I do not cite any studies that use AI, to the extent that it is possible to know.

Yesterday I used this "AI -Free Statement" in a conference talk for the first time. Still trying to figure out the exact language.

Feel free to borrow, modify, etc.

Honestly, copyright never seemed like the right approach to this to me, so I'm not surprised.

Copyright law was designed in the era of books, and only slightly updated for the internet. It was meant to stop people literally *copying* a work. It has no appropriate tools to deal with generative AI.

Once again, it must be said as loudly as possible: AI can't do the things described in this paragraph, and there is no pathway to it ever being able to do them.

The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives We have surely gone beyond being able to give the tech sector the benefit of the doubt

The copyright war between the AI industry and creatives https://on.ft.com/3T450Vm | opinion

It’s fascinating to see Microsoft and Apple go in such different directions when it comes to AI.

Microsoft went all-in and wrote “Sparks of AGI” www.microsoft.com/en-us/resear...

Apple has done the bare minimum and just wrote “The Illusion of Thinking” ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-i...

South Korea gender divide update 😲

Young men lean right by 50 points
(74% conservative vs 24% centre-left)

Young women lean left by 22 points
(58% centre-left vs 36% cons)

One of the things I most resent about AI is the way it has inserted itself, unwelcomed, between me and my students, especially the ones I don't know all that well yet. I hate that every time I read a piece of student writing a small piece of me is thinking "is this a robot or a person?"

Anthropic's Hannah Moran finally addressed the elephant in the room at this conference when she subtly dropped "Agents are models using tools in a loop" during the intro to the "Prompting for Agents" workshop simonwillison.net/2025/May/22/...

Buried in the tax bill: "no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act."

disco-eth/EuroSpeech · Datasets at Hugging Face We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

EuroSpeech: Massive Multilingual Parliamentary Speech Corpus

- 78,100+ hours across 22 European languages
- 50,500+ hours of quality-filtered data (CER < 20%)
- Robust alignment algorithm for non-verbatim texts
- Dramatically expands resources for 19+ languages

huggingface.co/datasets/dis...

Today, we’re announcing the preview release of ty, an extremely fast type checker and language server for Python, written in Rust.

In early testing, it's 10x, 50x, even 100x faster than existing type checkers. (We've seen >600x speed-ups over Mypy in some real-world projects.)