Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates
We’re all used to two types of magnet. The common one, the fridge magnet, is ferromagnetic — its atomic magnets all point the same way (up or down), adding their magnetic effects. The less well known one, the antiferromagnet (AF), has neighbouring atomic magnets that point opposite ways and exactly cancel out magnetically. For a […]
GitHub Actions Has Problems
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The Future of Mathematics
The Future of Mathematics 5 October, 2026 in guest blog, math.HO, opinion | by Terence Tao [This is a guest post by Jeremy Avigad. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] “Mathematics underwent, in the nineteenth century, a transformation so profound that it is not too […]
Beam: Reflection’s 501B open-weight model
We are introducing Beam, Reflection’s first open-weight model. Beam is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 501 billion total parameters, 23 billion active, built for coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads. Beam’s capabilities come from major investments in both pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL). We pretrained the model on 23.8 trillion diverse, curated, high-quality tokens from the […]
Questions for Believers in AI Consciousness
This weekend, I had been intending to start writing a careful and comprehensive ‘how to argue against the people who believe AI is conscious’ piece. But, at this very minute, everyone is going crazy on the internet shouting at each other about these things, so here instead is my quick attempt to help! If you […]
Why Plain Text Is Still One of the Best Technologies We Have
There are not many computer file formats I would trust to still be readable fifty years from now, but plain text is one of them. That may sound like faint praise. A text file cannot embed a spreadsheet, preserve elaborate page layouts, run a presentation, or provide many of the conveniences we expect from modern […]
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
Recently, multiple organisations have disclosed how clusters of so-called “rogue” AI agents attempted to break into websites and online services, sometimes successfully. Agents from OpenAI’s environment, in particular, are known to have used other public wikis (collaboratively edited websites not owned by us) to communicate and coordinate with each other. These types of successful intrusions […]
US closely monitoring case of lab worker who possibly died of plague in Siberia
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has said the US is closely monitoring the case of a Russian laboratory worker who died last week after a reported accident at a plague research institute in Siberia. “We’re watching and monitoring it closely,” Rubio said on Monday before leaving for a trip to Europe. “I don’t […]
The future of independence is interdependence
The future of independence is interdependence — Angie Dixon I spend most of my life in one room. At first glance, that may not sound much like independence. I cannot easily walk through my house. I need my husband’s help with some ordinary tasks. My daughter brings me things from the outside world. Groceries, medications, […]
Borland Turbo Basic
Turbo BASIC Turbo BASIC started life as BASIC/Z and written by Robert “Bob” Zale. It was the first interactive compiler running on the CP/M operating system, but in 1987, Borland purchased it and published it for MS-DOS. It was sold only for a couple of years, before being discontinued, so Bob bought the rights back […]