Tootfinder

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"

I was sent a link to slowinternet.info and it's interesting how off-putting the images are to me. I struggle to take in the message because of how angered I am by the AI-generated pictures, which are clearly mashed up using art from Simon Stålenhag.

Senate Republicans share an AI-generated video falsely depicting Chuck Schumer saying on camera comments he made in a print interview on the government shutdown (Thomas Beaumont/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/schumer-art

The 2026 Ockham New Zealand Book Award disqualified two books citing AI-made covers; their publisher says AI's rise has put the industry in "uncharted waters" (Jin Yu Young/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/books/new-zealand-ocham…

Pinterest adds new tools to let users limit how much AI-generated content they see in their feed in certain categories, including beauty, art, and home decor (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/pinterest-ad…

The Oatmeal comic about "AI" "art" is great, but I have to critize the "I like AI, I use AI" part; there's a selection bias at work—he sees the generated "art" as very obviously for what it is, (dehumanizing low-effort slop) but doesn't make the logical conclusion that this is true for _any type of output_ (e.g. text); it always dehumanizing low-effort slop that's not worth looking at, listening to or reading.

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

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/

I see that with a lot of criticism of generative "AI"—people state that obviously it's completely unreliable and untrustworthy for _their domain of expertise_ but they'll somehow gladly use it for other stuff.
I believe this cognitive dissonance has to do with how the chatbots pretend to be humans and trick us to assume agency when there is none.
Anyway, as I said otherwise it's great, you should read it: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/ai_art

Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt win the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on how innovation and technological progress helps economic growth (Eshe Nelson/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/13/business/nobel-prize-economics.html…