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Thomas L. Friedman: We Just Set Off the Second Big Bang
Trump administration has pushed off 13% of Americans enrolled in food stamps
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Charity workers supporting the family of Andrew Frederick are demanding immediate government intervention to clear the path for a full investigation to begin almost 10 months after his death, which has been ruled a homicide by a pathologist.
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Every autumn, Corvo Island in the Azores turns off its public lighting for a few key days to help fledgling Cory’s shearwaters as they attempt to fly to the ocean guided by the stars
Once a year, Corvo, the smallest and most northerly island of Portugal’s Azores archipelago, goes dark. Since 2019, the island’s 450 or so inhabitants have chosen to switch off the lights every autumn for five nights to tackle the disastrous effects of artificial light on Cory’s shearwaters, a seabird endemic to the Atlantic Ocean.
It began in 1991 when the community noticed huge numbers of deaths among young shearwaters.
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Continue reading...The Former General Who Could End the Netanyahu Era
Gadi Eisenkot’s office is small and sparsely furnished. There are no medals on display, no photographs with foreign dignitaries or political luminaries, none of the trappings of a decorated general who rose to become chief of staff of Israel’s military. The space, tucked inside a commercial building in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat HaSharon, is conspicuously devoid of ostentation.
Beside his desk sit three photographs. One is of his son Gal, who was killed fighting in Gaza in Dec. 2023, two months after the war began. Another is a family portrait taken during a visit to Washington, D.C., years earlier, a picture of a family still whole, before the war shattered it. The third shows Gal next to one of his closest friends from their military unit, who was also killed in combat. “He was a settler,” Eisenkot says of his son’s friend. The image conveys a snapshot of contemporary Israel: the son of a centrist military commander and a young man from a West Bank settlement, products of different worlds, serving and dying alongside one another.
As we speak, Eisenkot, dressed in his trademark black polo and black pants, pauses to pick up the photographs. He recalls the days after his son’s death. After three nights of sitting shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual, he left his grieving family to attend a meeting of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet. “I decided to go forward,” he says.
Now Eisenkot hopes to move not only himself forward but his country. The former general has emerged as a leading challenger to Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Polls suggest a close contest, with Eisenkot seeking to assemble a coalition capable of ending Netanyahu’s rule three years after he presided over the worst security failure in Israel’s history, launched the war in Gaza, and led the country into deepening international isolation.
Eisenkot has cultivated a reputation for integrity, competence, and personal rectitude, forging relationships across Israel’s fractured political spectrum. But perhaps his most powerful political asset is his devastating personal loss. In a country scarred by the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed, Eisenkot’s grief is familiar to countless Israelis. His effort to persevere mirrors a nation’s struggle.
The Oct. 27 election will be more than a referendum on Netanyahu. It will test whether Israelis are prepared to chart a different course after three years of bloodshed, recriminations, and cultural fracture. The country is deeply polarized, increasingly castigated by the rest of the world, and confronting a resurgence of antisemitism. Voters will determine not only who governs Israel but what kind of nation Israel will become—and whether its next leader can begin to heal the divisions that have left the world’s only Jewish state facing one of the gravest crises in its history.
Netanyahu, of course, can never be counted out. The consummate political survivor, he has weathered scandals, electoral defeats, and corruption charges. His credibility has suffered, but many Israelis still regard him as the only leader who can protect them in a dangerous region. Eisenkot could assemble a coalition with other opposition figures, including former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Yair Golan. Netanyahu would depend on the far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whose ultra-nationalist politics have found a receptive audience among younger right-wing Israelis.
Israel’s fragmented parliamentary system offers no guarantee of a decisive outcome. Negotiations could drag on for weeks, or fail altogether, sending Israelis back to the polls. Eisenkot tells me he will not serve in a unity government with Netanyahu under any circumstances. He has framed his ambitions around nothing less than the sustenance of the Zionist enterprise: the ability of Jews to live safely in a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. In his telling, that means confronting the threat from Iran; restoring Israel’s standing in the world; preserving the country’s character as a Jewish democracy; and finding an accommodation with the Palestinians, who lay claim to the same land and have their own aspirations to self-determination.
“What holds the country together is the Jewish and democratic ethos of the majority of Israelis,” says Yossi Klein Halevi, a bestselling Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. “That's what we're going to have to try to repair. That is really what Eisenkot is offering the country.”
For Eisenkot, the challenge is not merely to replace Netanyahu but to lead Israel beyond the trauma that has consumed it since Oct. 7. He sees a country caught between the imperative to protect itself and the need to recover the democratic values, national solidarity, and international legitimacy that are essential to its survival. “I feel like it’s a historic mission—to save the state of Israel,” he says, invoking his son and the many others who died defending the nation. “We owe it to them to be worthy of the sacrifice they made.”
On Oct. 7, 2023, Eisenkot awoke shortly after 6 a.m., stirred by nothing more than his circadian rhythm. When he turned on the television, he saw the first images of a catastrophe unfolding a short drive south of his home. Thousands of Hamas-led militants were pouring into southern Israel by land, air, and sea. They rampaged through kibbutzim and the streets of Sderot, descended on the Nova music festival, where they murdered civilians, raped women, desecrated the bodies of the dead, and dragged hundreds of hostages back into Gaza. Many filmed themselves carrying out the atrocities, celebrating the carnage as it unfolded. Desperate Israelis called the authorities, pleading for help that would not arrive for hours. By the time security forces regained control, entire communities had been devastated by the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Eisenkot’s son Gal, 25, was staying at the family home in Herzliya, outside of Tel Aviv, rather than his apartment near Tel Aviv University, where he was studying bioinformatics. He had come home for the holiday of Simchat Torah. Eisenkot woke him. “Gal, come to see the TV,” he said. “There are trucks of Hamas inside Sderot. This means war. Where is your military equipment?”
Gal had completed his compulsory service and was now a reservist, trained as a combat medic. Eisenkot drove him to his unit’s base, where lines of cars were already forming as reservists converged. “I knew right away that Israel, that the world, would never be the same,” Eisenkot says.
Four days later, with a ground invasion of Gaza looming, Netanyahu asked Eisenkot to join a small war cabinet. Eisenkot had served under Netanyahu as chief of the general staff from Feb. 2015 to Jan. 2019, but the two men were now political adversaries. Netanyahu had hoped to project unity to a divided public, much of which had come to distrust or despise him. After months of mass demonstrations against his efforts to curtail the power of the judiciary, he sought to rally the country behind the coming war.
One of Eisenkot’s first priorities in the war cabinet was to prevent the opening of a second front against Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group in Lebanon. Some of Netanyahu’s senior ministers, particularly Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, favored launching a preemptive offensive against Hezbollah, despite objections from the Biden Administration. Eisenkot argued that Israel needed to concentrate its military resources on defeating Hamas in the south before embarking on another major conflict. On that question, he prevailed.
On another matter, one he considered even more urgent, Netanyahu was less receptive. Hamas had abducted 251 people on Oct. 7, and Eisenkot believed securing their release should take precedence over a full-scale military campaign. It was, in his view, a fundamental obligation of the state, part of the covenant between a country and its citizens. Once Israel plunged into a prolonged ground war, he feared, the prospects of recovering the hostages alive would diminish. “My idea was to do the hostage deal, and after that, defeat Hamas,” Eisenkot tells me.
Netanyahu chose a different course. Israel launched a ground invasion following an extensive aerial bombardment of Hamas’s military infrastructure, including its vast network of subterranean tunnels. Hamas had embedded military facilities and weapons in densely populated areas, deliberately exposing civilians to grave danger. The military campaign that ensued has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Two months into the war, Eisenkot suffered a catastrophe of his own. He was at a military headquarters, studying a satellite map showing the positions of Israeli battalions near some of the fiercest fighting in Gaza. Fifteen minutes later, a major general who had once served under his command approached him.
“Gadi, come to me,” the officer said. “Gal is critically injured. Go home”
Eisenkot had spent more than four decades in the Israeli military. He knew what those words meant. If his son were still alive, he would have been told to go to the hospital, not home. “I understood he was dead,” he tells me.
Gal died in combat alongside his friend Eyal Berkowitz, a young man from a West Bank settlement. It was Berkowitz whose photograph Eisenkot had shown me in his office, standing beside Gal.
Thousands attended Gal’s funeral, which was broadcast on national television. Across the country, Israelis watched one of their most decorated commanders mourn the loss of his own son. Eisenkot delivered a eulogy, his voice trembling. “I promise you that we will continue to be a united and happy family, so that your sacrifice and that of the other fallen will not be in vain and that we will be worthy of it,” he said. “I salute you, beloved son.”
Three days later, Eisenkot returned to Netanyahu’s war cabinet. He watched as Netanyahu’s prosecution of the war turned Israel into a pariah state. Images circulated daily on social media of children killed as collateral damage in strikes on Hamas targets. Netanyahu resisted allowing aid into the Strip. The world accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war and committing war crimes against a trapped population of 2 million.
He recalls his final meeting with Netanyahu, in late June 2024, when the prime minister appeared before a special intelligence committee in the Knesset. Eisenkot pressed him on how he intended to end the war. “What is your exit plan?” he asked. Netanyahu offered none, Eisenkot says, insisting instead that Israel would continue fighting until it achieved “total victory.”
Eisenkot reached into his briefcase and pulled out a book: Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, Martin Indyk’s 2021 study of Kissinger’s statecraft. Indyk, who served in senior diplomatic roles under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was a friend of Eisenkot’s and a longtime critic of Netanyahu. “Have you read this?” Eisenkot asked. Netanyahu said he had not. Eisenkot urged him to do so, arguing that military force without a diplomatic strategy could not deliver a lasting victory.
“Gadi,” Eisenkot recalls Netanyahu replying, “I have a different view about the meaning of the word strategy.”
Eisenkot was enraged by Netanyahu’s refusal to prioritize the hostages. The suspicion among Netanyahu’s critics was that he feared a deal would fracture his coalition, potentially forcing elections that could remove him from power and trigger an inquiry into the failures of Oct. 7—much like the Agranat Commission, established after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, that led to the downfall of Golda Meir. In Eisenkot’s telling, Netanyahu put the preservation of his own power above the lives he was entrusted to protect. “He neglected them,” Eisenkot says.
A spokesperson for the prime minister did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On June 9, 2024, Eisenkot resigned from the emergency government, ending his eight-month effort to influence the war from within. His departure, alongside that of Benny Gantz, effectively ended the national unity arrangement and precipitated the dissolution of the war cabinet. But the war was not finished exacting its toll on Eisenkot’s family. One nephew had already died fighting in Gaza on the same day of his son’s funeral. Another was killed 11 months later.
Over the next two years, Netanyahu presided over a succession of extraordinary military operations. Israel killed Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader who helped mastermind the Oct. 7 massacre, and Ismail Haniyeh, the group’s longtime political chief. It assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and dealt devastating blows to the Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, including through an audacious operation that turned thousands of its members’ pagers into explosive devices. After Donald Trump returned to the White House, Netanyahu persuaded the president to join Israel’s 12-day war against Iran in June 2025, with U.S. forces striking three of Iran’s principal nuclear facilities.
But the military triumphs told only part of the story. For two years, the war in Gaza devastated the Palestinian enclave, killed tens of thousands of people, and left Israeli hostages languishing in captivity. In October 2025, under intense pressure, Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire and hostage-exchange deal that halted the fighting and secured the release of the remaining living hostages. “Netanyahu dragged it” out, Eisenkot says. “President Trump pushed him to do it.”
Months later, the confrontation with Iran entered a more perilous phase. Netanyahu helped persuade Trump to join a broader war against the Islamic Republic, a conflict that grew difficult to end and intensified criticism of Israel in the United States, including among elements of the American right. Around 60% of U.S. adults now hold an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a 2026 Pew survey.
Now, for the first time since Oct. 7, Netanyahu must face the electorate. Eisenkot thinks Netanyahu has done little to help Israel recover, instead perpetuating the trauma, cultivating a siege mentality and an atmosphere of never-ending conflict that allows him to cast himself as the indispensable wartime leader. “I don’t know how Netanyahu wants to close the story,” Eisenkot says.
He decided he would try to write the ending himself.
Eisenkot’s strategy has been to assemble a broad coalition. To his right, he envisions Bennett and the secular nationalist Liberman; to his left, Golan, leader of the Democrats, the successor to the historic Labor Party, and Lapid, the former television host who briefly served as prime minister. “I told them, let’s build a big party,” Eisenkot says.
He held a series of talks with Bennett about the prospect of running together, but ultimately declined, calculating that separate campaigns would give the opposition bloc a better chance of expanding their support. Instead, Eisenkot chose to lead his own party, Yashar. Bennett subsequently joined forces with Lapid. “I thought I had the ability to unite Israel, unite this divided country,” Eisenkot says, citing his military experience and relationships across the political spectrum. “It’s not from arrogance but from deep commitment to bring change and defeat Netanyahu.”
Eisenkot’s background also carries significance. Born in Tiberias to Moroccan Jewish immigrants and raised in the southern port city of Eilat, he belongs to Israel’s Mizrahi community, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent who have long faced discrimination from the country’s predominantly Ashkenazi establishment. If elected, he would become Israel’s first Mizrahi prime minister.
Eisenkot has campaigned on restoring public trust in government, strengthening Israel’s security, and preserving its foundation as a Jewish democracy. He has pledged to dismantle illegal outposts in the West Bank and crack down on extremist Jewish settlers who terrorize Palestinians, expand military or civilian national service across Israeli society, confront the threat from Iran, pursue a political resolution to the Palestinian conflict, repair Israel’s frayed relationships abroad, and restore national unity.
Travel through the country and the psychological scars of Oct. 7 are difficult to miss. They surface in the impatience of drivers, the intensity of political arguments, the restless energy of a society still living in the shadow of a nightmare. The country seems suspended in its aftermath, unable to separate the horrors of the past from the anxieties of the present. In some ways, it is still Oct. 8, 2023.
During our interview, Eisenkot and I discuss Bessel van der Kolk, the Harvard psychiatrist whose bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, explores how overwhelming experiences can leave people psychologically trapped in the past. Trauma, van der Kolk argues, can persist long after the danger has passed, disrupting the ability to integrate painful memories and move forward.
Eisenkot believes Netanyahu has purposefully made that process harder. Nearly three years on, Israel has yet to establish a state commission of inquiry into the failures that allowed the attack to happen. Without an authoritative accounting, Eisenkot argues, the country cannot fully reckon with the catastrophe. He pledges to establish such a commission within his first 14 days in office, with a mandate to investigate not only Oct. 7 but the decade of decisions that preceded it, including his own tenure leading the military.
He points to widespread suspicions that the attack involved some form of betrayal from within, a belief he attributes partly to Netanyahu’s efforts to shift responsibility onto military and intelligence officials. Netanyahu and members of his family have promoted disputed allegations that security officials deliberately withheld warnings before the Oct. 7 attack, including the claim that they failed to wake the prime minister as Hamas launched its assault—part of a broader effort by Netanyahu and his allies to shift responsibility for the security failures onto the military and intelligence establishment.
Recent polls show a close contest, with Yashar running ahead of Likud. But neither Netanyahu’s right-wing alliance nor the parties seeking to replace him appear assured of the 61 seats required for a majority in the 120-member Knesset.
“I think the chances for a unity government are high because we will be more than happy to have Eisenkot joining our coalition,” says Ohad Tal, a Knesset Member running with Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party. “If the other side will have a majority with the Arabs, God save us.”
Forming an alternative majority could require support from Arab parties, a fraught prospect in Israeli politics. Eisenkot will not commit to bringing them into his government. Instead, he has set four conditions for any coalition partner: recognition of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; adherence to the principles of its Declaration of Independence; acceptance of a national-service obligation for all citizens, with civilian alternatives to military service; and agreement that Hamas is a terrorist organization that must be dismantled. None of the Arab parties has yet to accept the latter tenet.
“I understand that in the Israeli system we must have a big bloc,” Eisenkot says. “It’s a huge challenge. I’m doing my best from morning till night. I’m convinced we’ll defeat Netanyahu.”
If Eisenkot succeeds, he says, he will break with Netanyahu’s defining political method: cultivating a siege mentality that pits Israel against the world. “The main challenge is to break Netanyahu’s method with them and us,” Eisenkot tells me. “This is poison to our society.”
Nowhere is that more consequential than in the United States, where support for Israel has deteriorated, particularly among younger Americans. “Netanyahu knows the United States better than all of us, but today he can’t improve Israel’s relationship with the U.S.,” Eisenkot says. “He may have a good relationship with the administration today, but the situation in universities, with American Jewry, with the bipartisan relations, are at their lowest.”
One of Eisenkot’s proposals is to gradually wean Israel off American military assistance. He believes the dependence has become a source of friction in Washington, and runs counter to the Zionist ideal of a Jewish state capable of guaranteeing its own security. “Maybe it will take five to 10 years,” he says, “and it is our interest to do it.”
Eisenkot opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, a goal long championed by much of the international community. But he also recognizes the profound danger of a one-state future: Israel would face a choice between granting millions of Palestinians citizenship and voting rights, which would end its Jewish majority, or denying them those rights, which would undermine its claim to be a democracy. He wants to prevent the vision of permanent Israeli control advanced by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir. “Smotrich’s vision for one state will be the end of our country,” Eisenkot says.
To avert that outcome, Eisenkot tells me he favors some form of separation in the West Bank, with a reformed Palestinian Authority assuming greater responsibility for Palestinian self-government while Israel retains military control over the territory. His approach to Gaza is different. He endorses the framework of Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which calls for a technocratic Palestinian administration to govern the enclave and envisions a conditional pathway to Palestinian statehood.
“We have two options: the 20 points of President Trump, or to use force,” Eisenkot says. “I prefer the diplomatic option—and I believe I can do it. But if not, I know how to dismantle Hamas with force.”
For all his confidence in working with Trump, Eisenkot and his advisers were surprised when the president endorsed Netanyahu. Trump had previously passed up opportunities to do so, including in an interview with TIME. Some of his closest Middle East advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, had grown frustrated with the Israeli leader. According to people familiar with the discussions, Fox News host Mark Levin and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee urged Trump to back Netanyahu in the closing days of the campaign. “Israeli society is independent and will make its own decision,” Eisenkot says. “I have no doubt Trump will accept every democratic choice in Israel.”
Netanyahu’s political operation has circulated a stream of AI-generated videos attacking Eisenkot, including one depicting him in a field approaching a young Israeli soldier who bears a striking resemblance to his dead son. Instead of embracing the soldier, the figure resembling Eisenkot pushes him aside and embraces Mansour Abbas. “I felt contempt,” Eisenkot says when we discuss the video. “That is the lowest he could go.” The invective has only continued. Yinon Magal, a Channel 14 host and pro-Likud commentator, called Eisenkot a “monkey” on air. Netanyahu waited days before describing it as “highly inappropriate.”
Eisenkot sees the election as a test of whether Israel can preserve the democratic and national ideals of the Zionist movement or drift further from them. “My goal is that the Israeli people will be united and proud of their country,” he says. “That global Jewry will be proud of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people.” Many fear an exodus of Israelis should Netanyahu hang on. A Channel 12 poll in July found that 23% said they or any of their relatives would leave if the Israeli premier is reelected.
Eisenkot lacks Netanyahu’s rhetorical flair, polished English, and decades on the world stage. But he argues those advantages have grown less useful as Netanyahu grows increasingly polarizing, at home and abroad. For many critics of Israel, particularly younger ones, the distinction between the country and its longtime leader has become difficult to discern. “We need to return to speaking about sharing the same values,” Eisenkot says. “Nobody speaks about values right now. Everything is about interest, power, more power, and more power.”
As our interview draws to a close, Eisenkot returns once more to the subject of trauma, the force that has shaped his own life and, he believes, the fate of his country. “Netanyahu is unwilling to show the courage needed to end the war from a position of strength,” he says. “It will take years to close the trauma, but we must start now.”
- With Reporting by Liam Forberg
The MacBook Pro Max Just Dropped to Its Lowest Price Ever
Линия горизонта: как масштабная Вселенная решает главные парадоксы космологии
Линия горизонта: как масштабная Вселенная решает главные парадоксы космологии
В предыдущих разборах [«Геометрия пузыря» и «Миф о константе Хаббла»] мы пришли к выводу, что сфера реликтового излучения и таймлайн в 13,8 млрд лет — это не границы рождения мира из точки, а физический предел нашего трехмерного оптического горизонта видимости. Сама Вселенная очевидно старше и масштабнее этого пузыря. Однако у критиков стандартной модели сразу возникнут три фундаментальных вопроса, основанных на классической физике: если Вселенная существовала задолго до отметки в 14 миллиардов лет и занимает гораздо больший объем, то почему мы видим именно такой химический состав космоса, почему он не перегрелся и почему далекие галактики кажутся другими? Давайте разберем эти аргументы без привлечения ненаучных допущений о «бесконечности», пользуясь только логикой масштабных физических процессов.
Читать далееФайлы из браузера в браузер без сервера: что я узнал о WebRTC, пока делал tfile.io
Хабы: JavaScript, WebRTC, Разработка веб-сайтов, Сетевые технологии, Браузеры
Теги: webrtc, rtcdatachannel, sctp, turn, stun, opfs, compressionstream, p2p
When AI agents run your life
There are some days when there’s so much that needs to get done, I daydream about having a clone of myself. Between paying bills, life admin like renewing my driver’s license, keeping up with doctor’s appointments, and planning meals, it’s a lot. And that doesn’t even begin to touch the work that goes into making a podcast or managing my social life.
This feeling of overwhelm resonates with Sari Azout. She’s a mom of three who works in tech. “There is just so much doing,” she told Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “I wake up, and I have to do meal coordination and get my kids up for breakfast, coordinate carpools. Then a lot of work during the day, but there’s the email from the teacher, there’s the 20 group chats asking if you want to participate in this group gift. They don’t call it ‘the invisible load’ for no reason.’”
Silicon Valley says it has a fix for this kind of mental overload. They don’t want to clone us — at least not yet. But they do think they have the next best thing: AI agents.
Azuot was skeptical when she first got an invite to try an agent, but she says she eventually came around on the technology after back-to-school shopping snuck up on her. She used her agent to get it done. “It blew me away,” she said. “I remember that night coming home just feeling so calm and reading my son a book and feeling present. And I was like, ‘Wow, I actually was very cynical about something that is giving me more time for living.’”
Azout’s experience is, more or less, the sales pitch for AI agents: They’ll help you save time with everyday tasks, so you have more of it for what you want to do. But what are agents, exactly? Are they really all that? And what do we gain — and give up — when we use the technology?
On this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, I spoke with Reece Rogers, a senior software reporter at Wired, to find out. Rogers says to think of agents as the next evolution of AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT.
“I’d create this mental model of a tiny digital assistant that’s constantly searching the web, going through your email, and checking your calendar, trying to find ways it could proactively be helpful for you,” he explains. “Agents are more proactive. It’s scanning your email 24/7 and sending you a message, maybe highlighting a potential calendar conflict.”
Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Rogers, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.
What agents are out there right now?
At the start of this year, there was a tool called OpenClaw that really sparked this with early adopters in San Francisco, but now there are much more consumer-friendly versions, with one of the most notable being Meta’s Muse.
There’s also a tool from OpenAI called Dots. But where Meta’s Muse is free to download, OpenAI’s Dots is still behind a $100/month paywall.
You tried an AI agent for a recent story you wrote. How was that experience?
One personal example, to share something that I’ve actually been using agents for, is our couch. It’s broken, and finding a new couch has been a pain. We want a sleeper bed, but we want these specific colors. We have this specific budget. I’ve been using Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots to try to find a few different options for us.
One interesting thing is that Meta’s Muse is connected to Facebook Marketplace. There are these really good integrations where I can give it all these details, and it found a few good couches that are only maybe a couple blocks from me.
I really enjoyed OpenAI’s Dots experience as well. I spent about an hour talking to it on the phone, and the AI agent made a packet of all these different options I could find. Just this morning, it flagged that one of them is now 40 percent off.
Is that how this tech is typically used?
Most people are using this as part of a workflow. I attach it to my email, I attach it to my calendar, and I’m using it as a personal assistant to organize my life. But people have been quite creative.
One of the breakout uses for Meta’s Muse is people have been connecting their bank account statements and then using it to scan for subscriptions they might want to cancel. So it can be used in many different ways, though I will say I do not connect it to my own bank account for a myriad of reasons.
I’m not going to lie, the idea of giving any third party access to my bank information does not thrill me. I don’t love that concept.
That’s one of my biggest concerns about these AI agents: how much personal information we’re handing over to these large companies.
When I tested Meta’s Muse, it wanted access to my email, my bank account, even my passport expiration details. The pitch is convenience, but Muse users are automatically opted in to having all of their interactions with Muse used to train Meta’s AI models.
I would definitely recommend, if you’re sharing personal details, go into the settings and turn that off because you might be handing over even more information about yourself than you initially realize.
What is the privacy situation with all of this? We all have various apps where we don’t read and still click “I agree,” but this feels like it could be more invasive.
Yes, especially because it’s all about automation. If you’re automating things and it has access to all of your data, it could make mistakes and embarrass you in ways you might not even be thinking about.
There was this one really interesting story of someone who had connected an AI agent to their work Slack in addition to their bank account. And their agent just automatically posted how much money was in their checking account for all of their coworkers to see.
Oh no.
I would be mortified. So there are these kinds of mistakes that these AI tools can still make. If you’re interested in experimenting with them, I would be really thoughtful with how you’re setting up these tools as well as what kind of information you feel comfortable sharing.
“You can see in the marketing that these companies are trying to find some way to entice new users.”
How are these AI agents being marketed? AI is not popular right now. Just ask any politician who has a data center coming to their state. People are not loving it. How are they trying to sell this to the average person?
The AI backlash really is at a fever pitch right now. You could almost see that in the way that AI companies are trying to market these tools. They’ve really, really leaned into cuteness and into adorable mascots.
Muse, if you haven’t seen its agent, looks like a mix between a Labubu and an Ewok. It’s very furry, very cuddly, very cute. OpenAI’s tools also have similar kinds of blobs with large eyes that might be a little endearing.
I feel like companies are hearing this kind of feedback that people aren’t trusting AI right now, or maybe they have moral or ethical reasons they don’t want to use these tools. You can see in the marketing that these companies are trying to find some way to entice new users.
Do you think AI agents are ultimately going to worm their way into our lives despite how unpopular AI companies are?
I do think so. I think in a couple months, maybe when I go home from Christmas, I would not be surprised if my mom had an agent on her phone because it does feel like it’s breaking through to average people in the way that ChatGPT had a moment a few years ago.
Even though there’s a lot of distrust for large companies like Meta, I think there are some appealing parts of this that will bring in millions of people. I do see this as the future of the internet.
When I think of the dream of the average person working in AI in Silicon Valley, it’s “We’re going to use AI. It’s going to free up the free time of so many people. Work is going to get done faster. You’re going to have more leisure time.”
Has that been the case for the people you’ve spoken with who are using this? Has it given them more free time to enjoy themselves or has it done something else?
You would think so, right? You would think that if people are automating these boring aspects of their life, that they would have more time to go touch grass, go see a movie, have some fun. But it does feel like that time just gets filled with other work, other productivity measures.
While agents may be able to take some more annoying or tedious things off of your plate, I am not as optimistic that it’s going to give us this utopia or freedom where I’m always at the beach.
Натягивание совы на глобус: как «константы» космологии подгоняли под возраст Вселенной
Последние данные космического телескопа «Джеймс Уэбб» (JWST) создали серьезную проблему для стандартной космологической модели. На самых дальних рубежах наблюдения обнаружены массивные, полностью сформированные галактики и сверхмассивные черные дыры. Согласно принятому таймлайну, у материи было всего около 300–500 миллионов лет после Большого взрыва, чтобы собраться в эти структуры. По законам ядерной физики и гидродинамики это невозможно: газ просто не успел бы остыть и сжаться под действием гравитации за такой короткий срок. У официальной космологии на это есть «главный калибр» — аргумент о скорости остывания Вселенной. Физики утверждают: «Мы замерили температуру реликтового фона сегодня (2,7 К), мы знаем температуру, при которой космос стал прозрачным (3000 К). Разница составляет 1100 раз. Экстраполируя это через Постоянную Хаббла (скорость расширения), мы математически получаем возраст Вселенной ровно в 13,8 миллиарда лет». Звучит монументально. Но если убрать из этого уравнения слепую веру и посмотреть на сухие физические факты, выяснится, что вся эта математика — классическое натягивание совы на глобус. Причем признает это сама же академическая наука.
Читать далееКак правильно загружать и скачивать файлы по HTTP в 2026 году
Кажется, всё просто: делаешь ручку POST и отправляешь файл. Вопрос только — как. Способов три, и у двух самых популярных есть неприятные минусы.
El Salvador president says bodies found in Haiti are not those of hostages
12 injured, including 6 children, in shooting near Florida university, police say
Elon Musk says SpaceX closed Ukraine Starlink ‘loophole,’ while Kyiv denies breaching terms
На седьмом времени, или технический разбор циферблатных часов на российском ТВ
Казалось бы, обычная графика, которая появлялась перед новостями, или перед выход и концом эфира, но какое оборудование за этим стояло?
Узнать, что скрывалось за шестернямиКак мы создавали игры для редкого советского ПК «Юниор ФВ-6506»: воспоминания разработчика (MOROZ / Free Masters)
В конце 1980-х и начале 1990-х советская компьютерная индустрия переживала удивительный, но хаотичный бум. Рождались уникальные машины, о которых сегодня помнят лишь единицы энтузиастов. Одним из таких раритетов был «Юниор ФВ-6506» — глубокая и очень мощная модернизация «Радио 86РК», выпускавшаяся Киевским заводом УВМ.
Меня зовут Артур, в ретро-сообществе и титрах тех лет я известен под ником MOROZ. Я был одним из программистов творческой группы «Free Masters» (FM©). Нам было по 17–18 лет, и мы написали практически весь игровой фонд для «Юниора», включая аркаду Stone Pit («Каменоломня»), «Гномик», «Пирамида», «Академия» и адаптации западных хитов вроде Pac-Man («Ненажера»).
Сегодня я хочу рассказать, как выглядел коммерческий геймдев на закате СССР изнутри: от хардверных хаков до реальных гонораров.
Читать далееРоссия и Украина 27 октября прекратят огонь в Алешках для эвакуации мирных жителей. О соглашении объявил Белый дом
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Как я дал незнакомцам root-консоль на своём сервере: тренажёр инцидентов на gVisor
Я сделал бесплатный тренажёр, где дежурство можно прожить до того, как оно случится на проде: приходит алерт, у вас настоящая консоль Linux со сломанным сервисом, и нужно найти причину и починить. Называется он Prod is Down.
Я 4 года работаю системным администратором. Самое запомнившееся дежурство случилось в первый же месяц: в три часа ночи лёг один из наших сервисов, алерты сыпались один за другим, а я смотрел в консоль и не понимал, с чего начать. Логи? top? Перезапустить всё подряд? Сервис я тогда поднял через час и скорее везением, а настоящую причину — забитый логами диск — нашёл только утром.
Потом я не раз видел то же самое у других: человек знает команды, но под давлением алертов не умеет искать причину. На курсах разбирают команды по одной, а навык расследования появляется только после настоящих инцидентов. Устраивать инциденты на проде ради обучения никто не даст.
Так появилась идея — место, где сервер ломается по-настоящему, но без последствий: можно ошибиться, сбросить всё и попробовать снова.
Сейчас в тренажёре 13 кейсов: обучающий кейс 0 и 12 инцидентов — упавший PostgreSQL, OOM Killer, забитый диск, истёкший сертификат, 502 от nginx, кончившиеся inode, DNS, лимит открытых файлов, сбитое время и другие. Ничего устанавливать не нужно, консоль открывается в браузере; кейс 0 проходится без регистрации.
В статье расскажу не столько про тренажёр, сколько про инженерные задачи внутри: как дать незнакомым людям root-консоль на своём сервере и не пожалеть, как проверить, что игрок действительно починил сервис, и на что я наступил с gVisor.
Читать далееTwo dead and tens of thousands of properties without power as Storm Boelo batters UK
Man aged 60 and another in his 20s killed by falling trees in Scotland and London as Met Office reports gusts of up to 84mph
Two people were killed and more than 800,000 properties left without power after Storm Boelo and Storm Austen battered the UK over the weekend.
Two men, one aged 60 and the other in his 20s, were killed by falling trees on Sunday, police said. The 60-year-old died in south-west Scotland while the man in his 20s was killed in London.
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‘I’d rather live through something publicly than escape it privately’: Jack Antonoff on survivor’s guilt and still singing love songs after his breakup
Whether he’s playing the role of soul-baring artist or starry producer, the Bleachers frontman strives to keep his integrity intact. He weighs in on Ed Sheeran, his love of working on ‘high-stakes’ albums and why he’s standing by the songs about his marriage
Sitting in the restaurant of a Denver hotel, in the middle of a US tour with his band Bleachers, Jack Antonoff shrugs. “There’s this intense need to figure me out,” he frowns, “and I don’t really know where it comes from, because I keep explaining all of it.”
He has a point. For the last 12 years, Bleachers have released a succession of albums packed with Antonoff’s strikingly personal and frank songs. Being strikingly personal and frank was the whole point. Antonoff had previously been guitarist in Fun, a pop-rock band who went supernova with their 2011 single We Are Young. Despite co-writing a song that sold 10m copies in the US alone, Antonoff says he “hated” the experience “because I wasn’t the leader, they weren’t my words, and I needed to write a song that if I fucking died tomorrow would be my life story”.
Continue reading...Lara Croft is 30! We look at the video game icon’s biggest blunders
We all know the highlights of the tomb raider’s storied career – but what about the lowlights? We dig deep to unearth the archaeologist’s less glorious moments
Happy birthday, Lara! This month marks 30 years since Ms Croft first swan-dived into our lives with her unique blend of athletic prowess, archaeological expertise and giant knockers. More than 100 million Tomb Raider games have been sold since. We all remember the good times: the bold design and sheer playability of the original titles; the establishment of Lara as a 90s icon, embodying both lads’ mag culture and girl power; the way she made games cool, even appearing on the cover of the Face. We’ve had blockbuster movies, big budget reboots, and shiny reissues. And who could forget the time we got to powerwash her house?
But no one gets to 30 without a few skeletons in the closet – or in Lara’s case, butlers in the freezer. So here’s a look at the darker parts of her past.
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Преступность и портативные консоли. Безумная история Gizmondo
Я не устану удивляться тому, каким же раньше диким Западом была игровая индустрия. То у нее скандал и крах уровня апокалипсиса, то патентные войны, то Nintendo покажет всему миру, что с ней вообще лучше не связываться.
Не так давно я решил, что хорошо бы вспомнить тех героев, что в 90-х и начале нулевых пытались победить Nintendo на поле портативных консолей, а таких было немало. И вот в процессе написания этого материала я наткнулся на штуку, о которой как будто вообще никто не помнит, и очень зря.
Сегодня мы поговорим о Gizmondo, портативке с самой скандальной аурой в индустрии.
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Can machines be war criminals?
On the first day of its war against Iran, the United States killed 123 children when it targeted and struck an elementary school.
The strikes, ultimately approved by humans, were facilitated by the US’s Maven Smart System, an AI-enabled software platform developed by Palantir Technologies that allows the military to aggregate, organize, and process battlefield data. Operators fed Maven intelligence classifying the elementary school as an Iranian military facility, and the system, in turn, marked it as one of the priority targets for day one of the war. Though the site was formerly part of a naval military base, it had been converted into an elementary school in 2017 and had remained one since. The intel handed to Maven did not reflect this.
This mistake resulted in what some reporters have called “one of the single worst massacres committed by the US government since the Vietnam War.”
Such scenarios may become more common as militaries continue to deploy a once-theoretical technology — AI-assisted or autonomous weapons, capable of making both targeting and launch decisions on their own — on real battlefields around the globe. And they raise a troubling, unresolved question: When human beings and machines collaborate in violating international law, who is to blame?
In this case, the government and private sector are pointing the finger at each other. Some US Central Command personnel, according to Pentagon officials who spoke to Bloomberg, expected Maven to flag stale information or inconsistencies in the underlying intelligence assembled for potential targets. Meanwhile, a Palantir spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company “is not responsible for the underlying data nor identifying intelligence deficiencies,” while also denying that the evidence indicated that its software was at fault in the strike.
This debate underscores the fact that AI and autonomous weapons are raising a new host of unresolved issues within the law, even as they’re actively assuming positions on the battlefield. In institutions where the line between human and machine decision-making continues to blur, how do we assign responsibility for war crimes? And, are the laws in place suited for the job?
In institutions where the line between human and machine decision-making continues to blur, how do we assign responsibility for war crimes?
To unpack some of these issues, I spoke with international law expert Allen Weiner, a senior lecturer at Stanford Law School, where he teaches courses on the law of armed conflict. Before teaching at Stanford, Weiner practiced international law in the US Department of State for more than a decade. We discussed the difficulties in attributing criminal responsibility, achieving justice for those harmed by lethal autonomous weapons, and much more. The conversation below has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
How do autonomous weapons challenge traditional understandings of responsibility when it comes to the law of armed conflict?
For most of the 20 years I’ve been teaching at Stanford, there’s been a real fascination and fixation on the problem of autonomous weapons. But the truth is that up until pretty recently, nobody really had any [of them]. It was more of an idea than a problem. It’s only in recent years that we have begun to see the deployment of tools that seem to have the capability [to make decisions themselves], so this does raise the question about compliance with illegal orders and where in the chain responsibility lies.
There are different theories about this. Some people say that if we’re engaged in an illegal attack, that has to be because of the programming or the code, so the manufacturers are somehow responsible for committing war crimes.
Other people would say no, that’s not the case, especially if the military has said the tool is not allowed to make very substantial autonomous judgments, or can’t say no. Then it’s basically the commander, at the point they decide to deploy this weapon, who might be responsible for the illegal acts, even without knowing in advance what they’re going to be.
So to finish where I began, this does present a big challenge to our traditional understanding of responsibility for targeting decisions and of what it would mean if there were an obligation [for autonomous weapons] to say no.
The real issue is not the obligation to say no, but this: If you train a tool and it wages war in a manner that’s unlawful, where does responsibility for that lie?
If a commander gives a clearly illegal order, such as, “blow up this school,” it seems clear that responsibility falls on the commander. But I could imagine a scenario where a commander is using an AI-assisted or autonomous weapon, isn’t giving it any illegal orders, is trusting that it will operate within the law, and the weapon breaks the law “on its own.” Where does responsibility fall in those cases?
I can imagine two different scenarios. One is that you say, “We’re going to carry out an attack against our enemy, and we want to hit them really, really hard.” Your tool has been trained to say, “We’re not allowed to hit civilian objects,” so it might say, “I’m not going to hit a school.” But if the military has said, “Don’t refuse any targets,” then it might override the way it’s been trained.
We’re seeing this already, with the stories coming out about breaches where AI tools, Claude and ChatGPT in particular, interpret their instructions in a way that causes them to do something the person who gave the instruction would not have wanted. When Anthropic gave Claude a challenge to figure out if it could do something, the tool figured out, well, maybe we should break into Hugging Face as a way of solving this problem, and the people who gave the AI tool the challenge never intended that.
So if you said, “We want to launch a really punishing campaign,” what happens if the tool on its own says, “Nothing’s going to hurt them more than seeing their kids killed, so let’s attack the school?” That’s one risk, and it’s a real challenge.
So [as for who’s responsible], it’s not the commander who said “hit them hard,” because when he said that, he didn’t mean “attack schools.” It’s not really the companies, because the companies didn’t want them to hit schools either.
But the tools are out there, reading everything on the internet, and it came across something that said the way you win a war is by attacking the things your adversary holds most dear, and they hold nothing more dear than their children. So it makes this kind of judgment on its own. And it’s not as if you can go back and say who ordered it to hit a school, which is the thing that is clearly illegal. So I do think there’s a risk of diffusion of responsibility here.
You could say the commander knew the tool might work this way, or the person who decided to contract with Palantir or with Claude, whoever it is, to build this tool. But if we’re really thinking about criminal responsibility, the level of responsibility you would need to convict someone requires a culpable mental state. You would need the person to intend, or at least know, that they were authorizing an attack against the school. And I can easily see a commander saying, “I had no idea.”
The decision to authorize this tool, or to give an instruction like “hit them very hard,” could be a basis for some other kind of accountability — administrative discipline within the military, a reprimand, your rank is lowered. But if we’re talking about criminal responsibility, which is what we often think about when we talk about war crimes, I think this diffusion of responsibility is going to make it very hard to identify any single individual who has the required mental state to give rise to accountability.
The second scenario is where the tool just makes a mistake based on the information available to it. We saw that with the attack on the girls’ school in Iran, where it was pretty clear the tool was looking at old data. Now, who’s responsible for that?
Is it the people who said “give me targets based on this data set,” when they should have made sure the data and the maps were current? All of this strikes me as negligence or recklessness, and it does seem challenging to imagine a situation in which we would say yes, somebody here has committed a war crime.
“There can well be war crimes, but identifying who the war criminal is might be a big challenge.”
A war crime has been committed, but is there a war criminal? That’s the situation we’re seeing. There can well be war crimes, but identifying who the war criminal is might be a big challenge.
There’s a professor of law, Rebecca Crootof, who proposes the idea of “war torts.” Instead of thinking about war crimes involving autonomous weapons solely through a criminal responsibility lens, maybe tort law — which allows victims to sue wrongdoers for negligent, reckless, or intentional harm — could address the diffusion of responsibility you mentioned. What do you think about that idea?
I think the idea is interesting. We have to separate out the obligations that countries have under international humanitarian law. In a situation like the one I just described, where there’s a war crime but no war criminal, that doesn’t mean the country is not responsible. There may not be an individual who’s criminally accountable, but if a country targets civilians in a circumstance that’s unreasonable, that’s a violation of international humanitarian law, and that could be a basis for claims between the two countries.
Tribunals were established between Ethiopia and Eritrea, for instance, after the Eritrean War of Independence, that dealt with claims between the two countries for money damages, and some of them involved allegations of violations of the law of armed conflict. Iraq paid reparations after the first Gulf War for harms it had caused to people in Kuwait, under something called the UN Compensation Commission. So the idea that the state is responsible is well established, and one of the ways states would discharge that responsibility would be by paying money damages. That’s the domestic-law equivalent of torts.
Whether there would be a mechanism for [civilians] doing this in domestic law is an interesting idea. We would probably need legislatures, either state legislatures or the federal government, to create a private cause of action allowing people who have been injured to bring claims against, say, the manufacturers of these tools. But this gets procedurally very complicated, because there’s a whole body of law on federal sovereign immunity.
Could you sue the Defense Department? Probably not. Could you sue an individual soldier? Probably not. Could you sue Anthropic or Palantir? Maybe. But it would probably require Congress to enact a new cause of action, because in general it’s very hard to bring private lawsuits in US courts for violations of international law.
The basic idea of what we would think of as tort or civil responsibility is really the whole essence of international law. On the substance, states do owe responsibility to one another, and they can engage in violations of international humanitarian law that would invoke their responsibility. But then the whole separate question is whether you have a forum within which to adjudicate that and get compensation.
Does that look different in cases where violations of international law were committed by a human soldier versus a machine?
Well, we don’t know, because there have been no cases in the latter category. All of the international humanitarian law violations that have been the subject of international law claims were ordered by humans.
Now, if an American machine launches an attack against a girls’ school in Iran, and there were a court with jurisdiction, the US would be responsible. In some ways it wouldn’t matter whether it was an individual or a machine, because we don’t have to go down to the level of the individual actor, company, AI tool, or commander. The responsibility is the responsibility of the country. In some ways, that makes it easier.
If we pursued compensation through state-to-state claims, you’d be able to do that without getting into the details of who within the state that committed the war crime was responsible. The state whose school was attacked would say, “I don’t care. You committed a war crime, you’re liable to me, you’re responsible for the damages, and you can figure it out internally.”
But if we were doing something like a war crimes prosecution, where we’re trying to hold an individual criminally responsible, that would make quite a difference. We would have to deal with all of these difficult questions about responsibility and mental state that you and I are struggling with right now.
So, in most cases, the state would have to take responsibility regardless.
Right, and there are lots of [International Court of Justice] cases involving different aspects of the use of force. The principle that you can bring state-to-state claims for violation of these rules is quite well established.
But with international law, states have to consent to the jurisdiction of a court. They can do that in advance by saying “I’ve signed up to the jurisdiction of a court and I accept any claims that might be brought against me in this court,” or they do it on a case-by-case basis. And it may not surprise you to know that some of the most powerful countries in the world, the ones most likely to use force outside their borders, have tended to be reluctant to accept the jurisdiction of international courts and tribunals.
Russia, the United States, Israel, and China have not accepted the so-called optional clause jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. So there’s the substance, about the responsibility of states, and then there are the procedural aspects of whether these cases could be brought in court.
And Trump recently said everyone on the International Criminal Court should “resign immediately.”
Yeah, exactly.
And what about the role of these military tech companies, like Palantir?
“At what point does Palantir become a good target under international law? Or at what point does Anthropic become a good target under international law, if its AI tools are being used to promote the war effort?”
Another issue [I’ve been thinking on] because of the questions we’re talking about is when the companies themselves become combatants.
We know that a private company that manufactures airplanes, an airplane factory, is a good target under international law. At what point does Palantir become a good target under international law? Or at what point does Anthropic become a good target under international law, if its AI tools are being used to promote the war effort? I think that question is about when the connection of these private companies to the war effort, in a way we’ve never really seen before, meets the standards under international law.
A civilian loses their immunity when they directly participate in hostilities, or if they assume what is known as a “continuous combatant function.” Are there arguments to be made that some of these private companies are participating in hostilities by virtue of supplying the tools the military is using to wage war? I think that’s a really interesting question.