Tootfinder

Google says Gemini 3 Pro scores 1,501 on LMArena, above 2.5 Pro, and demonstrates PhD-level reasoning with top scores on Humanity's Last Exam and GPQA Diamond (Abner Li/9to5Google)
https://9to5google.com/2025/11/18/gemini-3-launch/

Google launches Gemini 3 with state-of-the-art reasoning, ‘generative UI’ for responses, more
Google today announced Gemini 3 with the goal of bringing “any idea to life.” The first model available in this family is Gemini 3 Pro...

Imagine ChatGPT but instead of predicting text it just linked you to the to 3 documents most-influential on the probabilities that would have been used to predict that text.
Could even generate some info about which parts of each would have been combined how.
There would still be issues with how training data is sourced and filtered, but these could be solved by crawling normally respecting robots.txt and by paying filterers a fair wage with a more relaxed work schedule and mental health support.
The energy issues are mainly about wild future investment and wasteful query spam, not optimized present-day per-query usage.
Is this "just search?"
Yes, but it would have some advantages for a lot of use cases, mainly in synthesizing results across multiple documents and in leveraging a language model more fully to find relevant stuff.
When we talk about the harms of current corporate LLMs, the opportunity cost of NOT building things like this is part of that.
The equivalent for art would have been so amazing too! "Here are some artists that can do what you want, with examples pulled from their portfolios."
It would be a really cool coding assistant that I'd actually encourage my students to use (with some guidelines).
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

Completing a PhD while coordinating a graduate school is no easy task in itself. So I’m delighted to hear that my colleague Maren Jordan from @… not only managed to achieve that, but that her dissertation “Temporalities of Reproduction: Fertility Transformations across Generations in the Sultanate of Oman” was also awarded the Frobenius Research Prize. Full statement …

Why fewer children are being born in Oman / Frobenius Institute Research Award goes to Maren Jordan

So Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein" is what they would call a "visual feast". Lavish production barely does it justice. Thoroughly enjoyed it, and it is as poignant as one would hope. Well worth it!
The only thing that grated on me was the weirdly unnatural composited lighting. I've seen this in other films and it bums me out. Gives me the same vibes as AI generated Art… Makes me wonder why it was decided to go that route, rather than lighting things pra…

It’s so yellow and ugly why do people like it I don’t get it.
At least the AI generated art on Pinterest blends in so well it’s hard to catch sometimes.
But the people making “illustrations” for business contexts don’t even try.

‘When you plant something, it dies’: Brazil’s first arid zone is a stark warning for the whole country https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/dec/28/brazil-first-arid-zone-stark-warning-for-country

Israel-based RAAAM, whose "GCRAM" on-chip memory tech aims to deliver up to 10x power savings relative to high-density SRAM, raised a $17M Series A led by NXP (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/sjjv3pp1bg

Chip giant NXP leads $17.5M Series A for Israeli startup tackling AI’s memory bottleneck
RAAAM Memory Technologies’ “GCRAM” promises denser, lower-power on-chip memory as the semiconductor industry races to support next-generation AI processors. 

Microsoft Open-Source Programs Office Director Stacy Haffner, and Developer Community VP Scott Hanselman announced today in the wake of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision, that they have just released the source code for the games Zork 1-3 under a MIT open-source license.
"Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source"

"World’s Largest Solar Panel Mural Powers Canadian Building While Cutting 150 Tons of Carbon Annually"
#Canada #SolarPower #Energy

World’s Largest Solar Panel Mural Powers Canadian Building While Cutting 150 Tons of Carbon Annually | Happy Eco News
Edmonton’s SunRise Building features the world’s largest solar panel mural, covering 34,500 square feet with colorful building-integrated photovoltaics. The installation generates 267 kilowatts of clean power, cuts 150 tons of CO₂ annually, and saves residents money while combining Indigenous art, sustainable technology, and cultural pride in one striking landmark project.

Just finished "Age 16" by Rosena Fung. It's an excellent semi-autobiographical graphic novel about beauty standards, being fat, and how these things echo down generations, connecting 1954 Guangdong, 1972 Hong Kong, and 2000 Toronto.
The art is lovely, as is the message of accepting your body and standing up to your family when necessary.
#AmReading #ReadingNow