Top Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools – Pen America
The 52 most banned books of the last four school years include National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, bestsellers, and beloved books by authors including Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Judy Blume. Since PEN America began tallying school book bans in 2021, thousands of books have been targeted repeatedly – as many as 147 […]
How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips
SINGAPORE – In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance. Completed in early 2025 and now undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly […]
FunctionGemma 270M Model
It has been a transformative year for the Gemma family of models. In 2025, we have grown from 100 million to over 300 million downloads while demonstrating the transformative potential of open models, from defining state-of-the-art single-accelerator performance with Gemma 3 to advancing cancer research through the C2S Scale initiative. Since launching the Gemma 3 […]
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns
Deliberate Internet Shutdowns For two days in September, Afghanistan had no internet. No satellite failed; no cable was cut. This was a deliberate outage, mandated by the Taliban government. It followed a more localized shutdown two weeks prior, reportedly instituted “to prevent immoral activities.” No additional explanation was given. The timing couldn’t have been worse: […]
There’s no such thing as a fake feather [video]
Military Standard on Software Control Levels
The mil-std-882e standard specifies levels of software control, i.e. how dangerous the software can be based on what it is responsible for. Although the standard is a little more complicated, we can simplify to essentially four levels: The most alarming case is when the software has direct control of something that can be immediately dangerous […]
Agent Skills is now an open standard
In October, we introduced skills—a way to teach Claude repeatable workflows tailored to how you work. Today we’re making skills easier to deploy, discover, and build: organization-wide management for admins; a directory of partner-built skills from Notion, Canva, Figma, Atlassian, and others; and an open standard so skills work across AI platforms. Manage skills across […]
Launch HN: Pulse (YC S24) – Production-grade unstructured document extraction
Hi HN, we’re Sid and Ritvik, co-founders of Pulse. Pulse is a document extraction system to create LLM-ready text. We built Pulse as we realized that although modern vision language models are very good at producing plausible text, that makes them risky for OCR and data ingestion at scale. When we started working on document […]
Mistral OCR 3
Highlights Breakthrough performance: 74% overall win rate over Mistral OCR 2 on forms, scanned documents, complex tables, and handwriting. State-of-the-art accuracy, outperforming both enterprise document processing solutions as well as AI-native OCR solutions Now powers Document AI Playground in Mistral AI Studio, a simple drag-and-drop interface for parsing PDFs/images into clean text or structured JSON […]
Using TypeScript to Obtain One of the Rarest License Plates
Most people never think twice about the random mix of letters and numbers the DMV assigns them. I’m not one of those people. Online, I’ve always chased having a clean and memorable digital identity. Over the years, I’ve been able to pick up handles like my first + last name on Instagram (@jlaf) and full […]