arxiv.org
Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access.
We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource.
We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1
bbc.com
Between 2008 and 2019, 766 public libraries closed across the United States, while in the United Kingdom, between 2016 and 2023, more than 180 council-run libraries were either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. Finland, instead, is expanding its libraries and transforming them into publicly funded community service centres where people can borrow much more than just books.
Research emerging from these initiatives – not just in Finland, but also in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Canada – already suggests that libraries play a significant role in promoting social inclusion, making a poignant argument: what if the value of libraries is not in how many books they lend, but more in how they help societies function? And what can the world learn from this Finnish model?
theescapenewsletter.com
While all these consequences are concerning, I think the greatest problem our earphones pose to us — and the one that led me, several years ago, to cut back my own use — is the way audio content can crowd out time we should properly spend with our own thoughts.
law.kuleuven.be
A recent study examining the regulatory and liability implications of AI-powered medical robots in the European Union revealed significant uncertainty regarding the legal frameworks governing these technologies. Drawing on surveys of 50 medical professionals across 20 countries and 19 specialties, expert interviews, and normative legal analysis, the study found that more than half of respondents were unaware of the legal frameworks applicable to AI and robotics in healthcare, while only 1.7% considered themselves well informed. The findings also revealed considerable uncertainty regarding liability. Nearly 60% of respondents questioned whether existing EU liability rules adequately address harms caused by AI-powered robots, while almost 80% called for clearer regulatory guidance before such systems are more widely deployed.
nonogra.ph
Anyways, I have no doubts that this will become automated once enough of the population has verified their identities. Post an inconvenient message about a politician, or get a little too rowdy in a group chat, and you'll get a letter in the mail or a knock at the door. Similar to the "love letters" sent by ISPs on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA when you enjoy a DRM-free media file.
english.elpais.com
When he reported the case to high-ranking officials at Brown, he got a cold reaction. The response from the president, he said, was absolute silence. The dean did not comment either until Serrano took the case before the Academic Code Committee. At that point, he received a note acknowledging that what had happened in his classroom was “a wake-up call.” Serrano, a Madrid-born economist who has been at Brown for 34 years, believes this is not enough. “That cannot be the university’s position before an incident of this magnitude. Academic integrity is a value worth defending. The faculty cannot be left on its own in a battle that is decisive if we want to preserve the future of higher education,” explains the 61-year-old professor in a telephone conversation from Providence, Rhode Island. To prevent AI from ending the prestige and utility of teaching, he feels, it is necessary to adopt a different approach: “We need to publicly admit the seriousness of the situation and open up a broad debate about the real extent of the problem.”
dam.stanford.edu
Historic and current memory and storage prices, collected in the spirit of John C. McCallum's classic memory-price dataset — interactive, with the raw data downloadable. Hover for details, click the legend to toggle series, drag or use the slider to zoom, and use the camera icon to export an image.
eff.org
The KIDS Act never answers an obvious question: how exactly is a platform supposed to address those activities if they’re inside encrypted communications that it can’t read? That will create pressure for providers to weaken private communications or limit features on encrypted private services.
That approach is especially troubling when it comes to ephemeral messaging. Disappearing messages are not a “loophole” or a dangerous design trick. They are a useful privacy feature that allows online conversations to function more like ordinary real-world conversations, which are not preserved forever in a permanent database.
spyglass.org
It was an exhilarating time to be blogging and Om was the linchpin of it all. As my inbox from back then confirms, he was the one behind the scenes pulling it along and holding it all together. Those of us more junior at the time – in tenure, if not in age – looked to him as a sort of Yoda. Blogging Yoda.
nytimes.com
By the late 2010s, he had established himself as a singular figure in the tech industry: an investor, an adviser, a writer and, above all, a moral compass on issues like privacy and the power of big tech.
“I kind of joke about this, but I think Silicon Valley has become the Babylon of the 21st century,” he told Techies. “I think we have a moral responsibility now I don’t think tech ever had to think about it before.”
Om Prakesh Malik was born on Sept. 29, 1966, in New Delhi, into what he later described as a solidly middle-class Indian family. His father was an Army officer and his mother taught high-school Sanskrit.
kunyuan.substack.com
The blind spot created by this dimensional slippage is more dangerous than getting a probability estimate wrong. It can make us feel that we have already built the deepest safety defenses before we have even reached the core risk.
I do not deny the seriousness of extinction risk. Biological annihilation is the strictest risk baseline; that is not in dispute. But a baseline is not the whole picture. If humanity is merely the biological population of Homo sapiens, then as long as human bodies continue to exist, the risk does not seem to have reached its deepest level. But what if what we mean by humanity also includes the human capacity, under civilizational conditions, to form judgment, calibrate against reality, take responsibility, create meaning, and shape the future?
blog.google
The debate over AI governance is stuck in a false choice between over-regulation and no regulation. There is a middle way: A pragmatic, evidence-based approach that recognizes the unique challenges and opportunities of both frontier AI and widely-deployed AI applications.
For the most advanced frontier AI models, an independent, federally overseen, industry-backed organization could set safety standards and verify independent, voluntary audits, similar to how other critical sectors are managed. This creates a nimble way to keep people safe without impacting progress. For widely-used AI applications, we can adapt existing laws to address specific social and economic impacts. This means using and updating current laws to tackle challenges in areas like child safety, copyright, and workforce transitions.
tools.simonwillison.net
12 results available. Miscellaneous HTML+JavaScript tools built mostly with the help of LLMs. See also /python/ for tools written using Python.
This collection is an experiment in prompt-driven development with very low stakes.
The colophon lists commit messages and transcripts for every tool.
The code lives in simonw/tools and many tools used the Claude custom instructions described here.
quantamagazine.org
For the very first time, biologists packed nonliving components into a cell-like membrane, piece by piece, and witnessed the bag of molecules start to behave like life.
news.cuanschutz.edu
If you are 40, healthy and sedentary, it is likely that you already have something going on inside your cells that will likely come back to haunt you in 10 or 15 years.
101ads.org
For locals, they're just life as usual in the Bay Area, but for visitors from around the world, they are mind bending artifacts of the tech domain — often striking, unintelligible, absurd, vague and dissonant. They're dedicated to very small groups of decision makers who commute daily on the main highway that connects it all: US Route 101. They're also breadcrumbs of the state of the art of Silicon Valley. They are culture.
youtube.com
Wolfgang Tillmans est professeur invité aux Beaux-Arts de Paris pour l'année 2025–2026. En complément des quelque 160 séances de tutorat individuel qu'il a conduites, il a conçu une série de séminaires à destination des étudiants, intitulée On My Mind. À chaque séance, organisée autour d'une entrée spécifique, Tillmans a invité étudiantes et étudiants à explorer un ensemble d'images, le plus souvent distinctes de son travail artistique, constituant une forme de bloc-notes visuel.
fnl.mit.edu
For universities across time, the library was the heart, research center, and substance of knowledge… When texts are accessed solely by digitized means, the learner is cut off from the process.
theatlantic.com
Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels.
github.com
AI-powered Solidity security skills — built by Pashov Audit Group. Solidity AI security audit - hundreds of Critical/High vulnerabilities found. Pre-audit scan with threat model, invariants, entry points, and git analysis.
techcrunch.com
Vinton Cerf will step down from his role as Google's chief internet evangelist next week, marking the conclusion of one of the most influential careers in technology history. Cerf, 83, and collaborator Robert Kahn are credited as being the architects of the networking protocols that became the internet we know today. His work developing and popularizing TCP/IP — the basic set of rules that lets different computer networks talk to each other — beginning in the 1970s has been recognized with numerous honorary degrees, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a Turing Award, among other honors.
lyrebirddreaming.com
It doesn't just set a new record. It has departed entirely from the range of previous observations. … The tropical Pacific is thus no longer oscillating around a climate that existed a century ago. It's oscillating around a much warmer baseline.
bbc.com
Muse Image was the tech firm's first foray into AI image generation but faced backlash as Instagram users were opted in by default. It meant that anyone with a public account could have their likeness used without their knowledge or permission.
arstechnica.com
While we're still in the early days of this field, a growing body of research suggests that video and world models can already be useful for synthetic data generation, policy evaluation, and some robot-planning tasks. There's enough to justify cautious optimism about these models, though it's worth noting that their reliability as general-purpose physical simulators remains unproven.
lucumr.pocoo.org
When I look at some vibecoded scaled-up projects the codebases become Babel not because nobody can communicate, but because nobody needs to. Every developer has a tireless translator that can explain a corner of the tower and make whatever local alteration they ask of it. The changes keep landing, even as the architectural language that would let the humans reason about them together disappears.
But it’s not the biblical story. At Babel, the loss of common language stops construction whereas in AI-assisted engineering, construction can continue after shared understanding has already collapsed. The lack of an immediate failure is what makes it curious and a bit disorienting. The tower does not fall, and so we do not notice what was lost. It just keeps rising.
theregister.com
The encrypted delivery path is understandable as privacy hardening, but it also removes the human-readable task/message text from local rollout history, trace reduction, and parent-side audit/debug surfaces. ... Guys, we don't want to build Skynet and then be unable to audit what it's doing.