Alternate history novel idea: a handful of people in a crowd in an outlying Roman province yell slightly louder.
The people's choice is clear.
Jesus goes free. Lacking a martyr to rally around, his disciples fade into obscurity a generation later.
Barabbas is crucified.
What happens next? Does he become the centerpiece of a new religion? Does western Europe become majority Jewish? Do the crusades etc still happen? Lots of interesting concepts to explore.
Source: OpenAI is developing an alternative to GitHub; the project is nascent, and the decision came after OpenAI engineers experienced an increase in outages (The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-developing-alternative-micro…
Theatrical Alternative? Ok. Lets try this!
EarlySciRev: A Dataset of Early-Stage Scientific Revisions Extracted from LaTeX Writing Traces
L\'eane Jourdan, Julien Aubert-B\'educhaud, Yannis Chupin, Marah Baccari, Florian Boudin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28515 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.28515 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.28515
arXiv:2603.28515v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Scientific writing is an iterative process that generates rich revision traces, yet publicly available resources typically expose only final or near-final versions of papers. This limits empirical study of revision behaviour and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for scientific writing. We introduce EarlySciRev, a dataset of early-stage scientific text revisions automatically extracted from arXiv LaTeX source files. Our key observation is that commented-out text in LaTeX often preserves discarded or alternative formulations written by the authors themselves. By aligning commented segments with nearby final text, we extract paragraph-level candidate revision pairs and apply LLM-based filtering to retain genuine revisions. Starting from 1.28M candidate pairs, our pipeline yields 578k validated revision pairs, grounded in authentic early drafting traces. We additionally provide a human-annotated benchmark for revision detection. EarlySciRev complements existing resources focused on late-stage revisions or synthetic rewrites and supports research on scientific writing dynamics, revision modelling, and LLM-assisted editing.
toXiv_bot_toot
'Rescuers flying blind' after Midwest tornadoes as Noem’s DHS lets $200,000 contract lapse - Alternet.org
https://www.alternet.org/fema-noem/
Kashable, which lets companies offer "socially responsible" credit and financial wellness programs for employees as a voluntary benefit, raised a $60M Series C (Mary Ann Azevedo/Crunchbase News)
https://news.crunchbase.com/fintech/kashable-secures-60…
Mistral, which once aimed for top open models, now leans on being an alternative to Chinese and US labs, says it's on track for $80M in monthly revenue by Dec. (Iain Martin/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/20