I love a good chart. This one is devastating. I really hoped to confine the Covid Pandemic to history but the Republicans in Washington DC have unleashed all of the horrible memories in service of political theatre.
Jerry Falade’s crime novel won a 14-way auction for over $2 million. Then an AI detector read it.
Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body attracted bids from fourteen publishers. Minotaur, Macmillan’s crime imprint, won. Film rights were in play. By any measure, this was an excellent story. Then AI detection tools flagged “fingerprints,” Falade’s agent lost faith, and the deal collapsed.
“When I talk to the leading researchers in the field of AI right now, for example, they literally refer to this — right now — as their Oppenheimer moment. They’re looking to history to say, ‘What are the responsibilities for scientists developing new technologies that may have unintended consequences?'” — Chris Nolan, July 2023 Techradar
Source: OpenAI, Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT-5.6, using Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.1 results.
OpenAI has cut the API price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 per cent, only three weeks after releasing it.
The new price is US$0.20 per million input tokens and US$1.20 per million output tokens, down from US$1 and US$6. Terra has also become 20 per cent cheaper. Sol is unchanged.
The chart above is the arresting part. Luna at maximum reasoning scores 51 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index. Claude Opus 5 at low reasoning scores the same. Yet Luna appears to cost roughly five cents per benchmark task, against about 35 cents for Opus.
Recommended: “An Audience With The Goodies” (with Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie, hosted by Stewart Lee) was recorded live at the Leicester Square Theatre in London in June 2018 (YouTube). Captured before the sad departures of Tim (2020) and Bill (2026).
The X-Twitter brutal fact checking continues - https://x.com/aaronsmith/status/2082449715418017796
Dave Hughes came back to me again last night with a bit of energetic goalpost shifting.
The bigger issue isn’t Dave Hughes. It’s that parts of our media think the person to ask about Australia’s economy is, Dave Hughes.
It’s like asking your plumber to perform your colonoscopy.
Watching this from Australia, it’s hard to overstate how strange it is: schools in Florida, Georgia and Colorado are installing pepper-spray drones built to ram an active shooter at up to 97 km/h. Nobody in the story proposes making the guns harder to get.
Nine schools so far. Each gets a storage box housing a plastic drone from Austin firm Mithril Defense, branded Campus Guardian Angel. A teacher hits a panic button. A remote pilot flies the drone down the hallway toward the gunfire.
But also seems to be stuck with both sideism.
Old journalist line is, “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the window and find out which is true.” - Hubert Mewhinney, Texas journalist 1974
Dave Hughes went on a podcast, spent 90 seconds confidently rewriting Australia’s recent economic history, then dared someone to fact-check him. Someone did. It took about 600 words to correct 90 seconds of what the fact-checker called “economic fan fiction.”
Hughes is a television and radio personality and stand-up comedian. Lately he’s drifted into political and economic commentary, most of it aimed at the Federal Labor government’s tax policy changes. He’s understood to run a substantial investment portfolio of his own, like plenty of the policy’s other critics, largely exempt from the change thanks to grandfathering.
In the clip in question, Hughes slates previous governments, (always Labor), while dropping in “I might be wrong” and “I haven’t researched it” as he goes. Caveats are not the same as caution. If you haven’t researched something, the option not to broadcast an opinion on it remains open.
A UK driving instructor’s leased Nissan sat off the road for three months this year, waiting on a single spare part. By the time it was finally repaired, she had spent more than £2,500 hiring a replacement dual control car, borrowed money from relatives to keep teaching and nearly lost her livelihood over a repair that should have taken days. The Guardian reported the case last week as a straightforward consumer complaint. It reads more like a warning.
The UK setting doesn’t matter. The same parts delays and the same insurance gaps are turning up in Australian driveways too, and mechanics here are already stretched thin before a missing part even enters the picture. If you own a modern car, two things in your policy now matter more than they did five years ago.