Andreas 🚀 WHY2025 DECT: 9583

Long shot: Does anybody have an old 3-axis stabilised phone/camera gimbal they no longer want?

I have a stupid idea.

Any other #CivicTech / #GovTech / #AIForGood folks at #WHY2025 who fancy meeting up, let me know!

Power is back and I've pitched my tent and had my first Mate. #WHY2025, I am in you.

So I should be in a field at #WHY2025, but KLM lost my bags (including tent, laptop etc) so instead I'm in a teeny room in Amsterdam. EURGH.

Both OpenAI oss models have now been live on ai-at-play.online for enough games to get an initial impression. The 120b model very impressive - stronger than 4.1 mini, but not massively though. The 20b model though is... Rough? Good at taking action, but not much strategy, but might need more data.

I keep considering buying one of those fancy wireless podcasting microphones, but then I realise that's the equivalent of paying for a posh gym membership and hoping you'll magically start going.

We've triumphed over both zombie knives AND ninja swords. Pirate cutlasses next.

Well, that didn't take long: scammers pretending to be verifying your account and asking for cash.

So I spent the last couple of weeks building the silliest LLM benchmark yet: ai-at-play.online, where 4 agents all play Risk against each other.

It's silly fun, but also, a fascinating benchmark and a terrarium of weirdness.

andreasthinks.me/posts/ai-at-...

#ai #games

A vocal coach named Tim Welch is having his eyes pop out of his head on that A5

My Roman Empire is queueing up YouTube "vocal coach reacts" videos of "Golden" from K-Pop Demon Hunters and watching the tops of their heads pop off when EJAE/Rumi hits that A5 for the first time

I'm off backpacking and need a new small/light laptop since the death of my beloved 11" Macbook Air.

Requirements:

* Decent keyboard
* An OS I can write code on (Not Windows)
* 512gb+ storage

Current frontrunner is the Chuwi Minibook X N150. Any other suggestions?

The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness? The evidence is equivocal on whether screen time is to blame for rising levels of teen depression and anxiety — and rising hysteria could distract us from tackling the real causes.

"we have a generation...in desperate need of the best of what science & evidence-based solutions can offer. Unfortunately, our time is being spent telling stories that are unsupported by research and that do little to support young people who need, and deserve, more."
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s Who needs Starlink when you've got an actual starling

Ok but does it run DOOM

www.tomshardware.com/pc-component...

My very silly side project, and also arguably the best llm benchmark of all time, continues to escalate.

ai-at-play.online

"Sony sues Tencent for allegedly ripping off 'Horizon' video games"

Well alright but surely it can't be that blata— lmao

So I tried the WhatsApp AI integration yesterday. It did not go well.

A character profile card for Tinky Winky with two strategy sections. Short-Term Strategy: “Place armies in Eastern Australia first because it whispers to me, then put just one in Mongolia while I tilt my head and giggle at the others.” Long-Term Strategy: “Hug Australia tightly and let its stillness spread, making everyone else join me without a word, one territory at a time.” Timestamp for both updates: 24/07/2025, 18:00:19.

A chat message showing Tinky Winky speaking to Napoleon Bonaparte. The message reads: "Whispers softly Teletubby hug? Giggles". The timestamp is 24/07/2025, 18:03:14.

A new warrior has entered the ai-at-play.online arena!

Tonights, watch the Godfather spin-off nobody has ever asked for at ai-at-play.online

I've added the new Qwen3 235B to my "AI at Risk" leaderboard... nobody else getting close to unseating gpt-4.1 mini!
Watch it live here:
ai-at-play.online

Had an unexpectedly great time showing this off at the @atproto.london meetup this evening! Thanks to @aendra.com ‬ for organising and hopefully see some of you folks for the next one!

So, I may have over-committed to a side project this week, but I believe I've made the silliest LLM benchmark yet...

AIs at Risk: watch LLM models attempt to play Risk, entirely through MCP tools. It rarely ends well.

ai-at-play.online

Justine Moore (@venturetwins) on X Had the new Grok waifu talk to Claude voice mode. Tell me this doesn't sound EXACTLY like an egirl trying to rizz up an autistic guy at an SF party?

Grok Waifu and the clash of the voice modes is going to be the big romcom of next year.

x.com/venturetwins...

CROYDON FOOD PRODUCTION CENTRE Introduction London Transport's Catering Department operates 165 canteens in the Greater London area, providing meals and refreshments for 74,000 staff. It is the largest single catering unit in the country. To ensure complete control over quality and freshness, as well as the economy of centralized bulk-buying, London Transport opened in 1950, at Croydon, Surrey, its own Food Production Centre, which today makes (or receives and distributes in bulk everything which is sold at the indi- vidual canteens. Buying is done daily, by highly experienced staff, at the actual markets, at competitive prices. To distribute its products, the Food Production Centre maintains a highly organized road dispatch service and supplies of perishable foods are delivered to canteens on six days a week. Bakery The Bakery Manager has an assistant, two supervisors and a staff of 48. The most up-to-date equipment enables the Bakery to produce a total of some 120 different bakery lines, totalling some 100,000 cakes and a further 100,000 other items a week. Including meat items, such as pies and sausage rolls, the total is in the region of a quarter-million a week. Over the year there are other special items—100,000 Hot Cross Buns, 45,000 Christmas Puddings, 15,000 Christmas Cakes, and 1,000 or so Wedding and other special made-to-order cakes.

B/W print; trainee cooks making pastry at the Baker Street training centre, by Topical Press, 1949

TfL (as London Transport) used to have its own factory for preparing food (including a butchery and a bakery) as well as its own cookery school.

www.ltmuseum.co.uk/collections/...

The Government Pen As a child, I thought it was extremely cool that working for the U.S. government meant that you could get a pen that said “U.S. Government.”

Sometimes, you learn a fact that reminds you just how much government has changed: in 1968, the US government commissioned a standard issue pen, according to 16 pages of specs. You can still get them today.

The Government Pen share.google/t3TYRMXoOck0...

Grok: searching X for “from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)” If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk’s stance before providing you with an answer. …

Remember when we thought press barons were trying to influence public opinion? Oh for those naive halcyon times....

simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/...

They'll be warning you about razor blades in Halloween candy next.

"The heart has no bounds": A study of polyamory in games, how it's done well, and where we should go next Set a date.

Eurogamer writing a whole article on polyamory in gaming and making me sheepishly smile in the process

www.eurogamer.net/a-study-of-p...

Incredibly amazing post by @jessrem.bsky.social with an important point about American housing—NY/CA build nothing, TX/AZ sprawl, but only a few American cities like Seattle, Atlanta, & DC are actually building lots of new dense housing in their core neighborhoods

Whenever anybody talks about grooming gangs, they should be asked what they think the average age of suspects is.

The Hydrant Programme The Hydrant Programme is a national policing programme supporting the work of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Child Protection and Abuse Investigation Working Group.

The police have set up a whole taskforce to do just this, but there isn't a law forcing people to disclose their ethnicity on arrest (and individual officers probably don't feel it's their job to keep asking over and over if they have arrested someone)

www.hydrantprogramme.co.uk