AI News Archive: June 24, 2026 — Part 10
Sourced from 500+ daily AI sources, scored by relevance.
- I Let AI Handle My Online Shopping. These 3 Tools Actually Changed How I Buy Things
I Let AI Handle My Online Shopping. These 3 Tools Actually Changed How I Buy Things PCMag
Score: 25🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/i-let-ai-handle-my-online-shopping-these-3-tools-actually-changed-how-i - Your enterprise AI agents should automatically remember which model is right for which task. Mindstone built the capability with Rebel
AI agent orchestration platforms are popping up like weeds these days, but London-based AI transformation startup Mindstone's Rebel might be among the most promising I've come across. That's because the system, which officially launched this week, is a local-first, agentic AI operating system distributed under a " Fair Source " license, allowing teams of under 100 users to freely adopt and customize it to suit their needs, while those organizations with more users will require paying for an enterprise license. The marquee features are its simplicity and extensive customizability to fit any given team, no matter how unique or specific the workflows, all based around the common, open source standard file format markdown, and, as a result, an organizational memory layer that ensures agents reliably use the enterprise's preferred AI models for each given task or even subtasks — dynamically switching between local and cloud ones in a predictable, visible way to save costs and maintain data privacy and security as needed. "Shared memory is the most empowering thing you could possibly do with a knowledge-worker AI," said Greg Detre, chief technology officer (CTO) of Mindstone, in a recent video call interview with VentureBeat. "You get this feeling of being a super-organism as a company that just gets smarter and smarter." Rebel is available now for macOS on Intel and Apple Silicon machines, as well as Windows, with Linux support in development. Mindstone has raised $5 million from private investors including Pearson Ventures, Moonfire Ventures and Zanichelli Venture. A distinctive, local-first architecture based on markdown files What makes Rebel distinctive is its local-first architecture. Instead of the approach found in developer-heavy agent frameworks such as as LangGraph, CrewAI and AutoGPT, which require teams to wire together databases, cloud infrastructure and state-management logic, Rebel's core agent memory and instructions live across local markdown ( .md ) text files — arguably the simplest, easiest, and most popular way to steer AI agents, one that has been widely adopted by AI developers and power users around the globe. Mindstone says Rebel stores its state, prompts, task instructions and memory hierarchy in these files, allowing users and companies to easily inspect, move or modify them as needed. A primary configuration file, agents.md, acts as the agent’s core instruction layer and runtime boundary. That architectural choice is partly about cost. Mindstone argues that common office formats such as Word documents and PDFs often carry formatting and metadata overhead that consumes model token context and raises API costs. Markdown keeps the information closer to raw text, allowing more of the model’s context window to be spent on the actual task rather than document structure. The company also positions the approach as a hedge against vendor lock-in. If a company’s agent instructions, automations and memory are stored locally as text files, they are not trapped inside one SaaS provider’s interface or database. That matters more as enterprises begin giving AI systems broader access to email, calendars, documents and internal workflows. Rebel also lets users create repeatable AI workflows. “Skills” are saved multi-step procedures an agent can reuse. “Operators” adjust how the agent behaves for a given task, such as reviewing a pitch deck from an investor’s perspective or evaluating work through a security lens. “Automations” can run scheduled background tasks, such as scanning messages or files, finding relevant updates, drafting responses, or preparing work before an employee opens the app. Automatically selecting the best, enterprise-preferred AI model for every task (and subtask) Another important feature is multi-model orchestration. Rebel can break a task into parts and route different steps to different models, including splitting between local and cloud-based ones depending on the sensitivity of the information or as guided by enterprise policies. A more powerful model can handle planning or complex reasoning; a cheaper model can handle routine work; a local model can handle sensitive steps or approval checks. This matters for enterprises that want flexibility or are seeking cost controls: not every task need be sent to the same expensive cloud model, and some enterprise workflows prohibit sensitive corporate data leaving local infrastructure. “I want to be able to say, ‘Help me with this,’ and it knows what’s personal, what’s sensitive, and what can be shared with the whole company," Detre explained. That model-agnostic setup gives companies more control over cost and security. Data-heavy work can run on lower-cost models such as Llama or DeepSeek. Higher-level reasoning can be reserved for more expensive models. Sensitive work can be routed through a local model running on the user’s machine, keeping that information from leaving the device. This approach also gives enterprise teams a way to mix cloud and local inference without treating the choice as all-or-nothing. By shifting away from centralized, monolithic cloud interfaces toward a local file-driven architecture, Mindstone is introducing a model for how enterprise technical decision-makers orchestrate autonomous workflows without forfeiting data sovereignty or predictability How it works in practice Mindstone CTO Greg Detre designed Rebel’s memory system to avoid a common problem in enterprise AI: dumping large amounts of company information into a database and hoping search will retrieve the right context later. Instead, Rebel uses a tiered memory structure. When an interaction happens, the system estimates how likely that information is to be useful again. Information with a high expected value is written into a local readme.md file tied to a specific project space. Information with a moderate expected value becomes a reference link back to deeper historical records. Lower-priority material is stored in an indexed memory directory, where it remains available but dormant until a relevant task calls it back. An ROI dashboard for enterprise buyers For larger organizations, Mindstone Pro adds an Impact Dashboard designed to show where Rebel is saving time and money across business units. Mindstone says the dashboard uses a separate, closed LLM to evaluate telemetry and calculate business impact. The company says the system is calibrated conservatively, using the lower end of estimated performance gains to avoid inflated productivity claims. That feature speaks to a practical problem for enterprise AI buyers: proving value without over-surveilling employees. Mindstone says the dashboard is isolated from individual workspaces, allowing IT and business leaders to evaluate adoption and return on investment without reading employees’ private agent activity. Fair Source licensing aims to reduce platform risk Mindstone is releasing Rebel under a Fair Source license, a model meant to sit between fully closed SaaS and permissive open source. Under the license, Rebel’s code is viewable, auditable, modifiable and deployable. Individuals and organizations with up to 100 concurrent users can run it for free. Once an organization exceeds that threshold, it needs a commercial Mindstone Pro license. The license also includes a two-year sunset clause. Twenty-four months after a given version is released, that version automatically converts to the MIT open-source license. For enterprise buyers, the practical pitch is that Rebel reduces the risk of being trapped. If every automation, memory file and agent instruction is stored locally in markdown, a company can move its data and workflows elsewhere if needed. The product may be commercial, but the underlying work is designed to remain inspectable and portable. Security questions focus on local approvals and shared memory Rebel’s debut on the open access tech product sharing platform Product Hunt this week prompted technical questions about how a local-first agent should handle permissions, safety checks and shared memory. One developer, Nikita Pokryschko, asked whether approval checks for sensitive actions could run entirely on a local model, or whether the gating logic still required a cloud call. Detre responded by explaining Rebel’s separation between planning, execution and background safety logic. Wöhle added that companies can configure Rebel to rely entirely on a local model for gating decisions. That distinction matters for corporate security teams. Autonomous agents often need broad permissions to read files, draft emails or interact with internal systems. If the final approval layer depends on an external cloud model, some companies may see that as a compliance risk. Mindstone is arguing that Rebel can keep those approval boundaries local. A second discussion focused on how Rebel decides what memory can be shared. Product developer Clement Morel asked whether shareability is determined by content, user settings or learned behavior, and what happens if the system gets it wrong. Detre said Rebel uses the user’s local “Chief-of-staff README” and defined spaces to separate private, team and company-wide information. When the agent encounters ambiguous context, the system pauses and asks the user for approval before proceeding. That emphasis on visibility is part of Mindstone’s broader argument against opaque agent systems. As CEO Joshua Wöhle put it in a post on his LinkedIn account : “If an agent is going to sit inside your workspace, remember your context, and ask permission before changing the world, you should be able to see how it works. Not because everyone will read the code, but because someone can.” Mindstone points to customer rollout as early proof Mindstone says Rebel has already been deployed across the 250-person workforce of customer Epignosis, covering sales, engineering, product, finance and customer success teams. "The entire organization is operating on Rebel today," Wöhle told VentureBeat. Over a 12-week deployment, Mindstone says Epignosis recaptured the equivalent capacity of eight full-time roles. The company says adoption spread organically after employees saw colleagues automate time-consuming work, a pattern employees reportedly called the “potatoes effect.” The Epignosis case is central to Mindstone’s argument that enterprise AI should not be treated as a set of isolated personal tools. Rebel’s shared-memory design is meant to let workflows move across teams and improve as more employees use them. “The border between learning and doing is fading out - and that changes everything about how you scale,” Epignosis CEO Dimitris Tsingos said in a statement provided to VentureBeat by Mindstone. Background on Mindstone Mindstone Learning Limited, headquartered in London, launched in 2020 under the direction of CEO Joshua Wöhle, previously a co-founder of the digital child safety firm SuperAwesome. Originally positioned in the consumer education technology market, the company built a digital curation tool likened to a "Spotify for learning" that utilized compound learning methodologies. However, following the widespread commercialization of generative artificial intelligence platforms between 2022 and 2024, Mindstone moved into business-to-business enterprise enablement. Leadership identified a critical "last-mile" barrier: while AI tools promised substantial productivity gains, traditional corporate training failed to equip the workforce to practically integrate them into daily operations. Today, Mindstone functions as a comprehensive enterprise software and training ecosystem designed to maximize corporate return on investment for existing AI licenses. The product architecture systematically addresses different organizational tiers through highly contextualized, "live-fire" software applications rather than abstract slide presentations. Financially, Mindstone utilizes a hybrid capitalization strategy that interweaves institutional venture capital from entities like Moonfire Ventures and Pearson Ventures with community-based equity crowdfunding on platforms such as Seedrs and Crowdcube. Mindstone has successfully penetrated the enterprise market, securing commercial contracts with blue-chip corporations including The Home Depot, Hyatt Hotels Corporation, Pearson, and Ernst & Young. Ultimately, Mindstone positions itself as the crucial antidote to corporate inertia, ensuring organizations establish the internal competency required to execute successful AI transformations. Mindstone’s bet: enterprise AI needs shared memory, not more seats Rebel arrives as companies are trying to move from AI experimentation to AI operations. The first wave of enterprise adoption centered on access: giving employees chatbots, copilots and model subscriptions. Mindstone is betting the next wave will center on coordination. That means shared memory, reusable workflows, local control, flexible model routing and measurable business impact. It also means giving enterprises a way to inspect the systems they are being asked to trust. The company’s challenge now is execution. Local-first software can be harder to manage than cloud SaaS. Shared memory raises governance questions. Multi-model routing adds complexity. And enterprises will still need proof that agentic workflows can deliver reliable productivity gains without creating security or compliance headaches. But Mindstone is making a clear argument: buying AI seats is not the same as building AI infrastructure. Rebel is its attempt to turn scattered employee experiments into an operating layer for work.
- Yili Unveils AI-Powered Comic Series to Bring Dairy Supply Chain to Life at China Chain Expo
Yili Unveils AI-Powered Comic Series to Bring Dairy Supply Chain to Life at China Chain Expo The Straits Times
- Focused on AI at the Enterprise Level: Ganguly
Raj Ganguly, co-founder and co-CEO of B Capital, joins Dani Burger on "Bloomberg Deals." They discuss how the use case for software is not going away and Ganguly's belief that enterprise services are the next wave AI growth. (Source: Bloomberg)
Score: 25🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-06-24/focused-on-ai-at-the-enterprise-level-ganguly-video - 5 Prompts That Get Dramatically Better Answers Out of Claude
Most people use Claude like a search box, ask a question, take the first answer, move on. The people getting genuinely useful work out of it are doing something different. They are giving it a handful of short, specific instructions that change the kind of answer it returns. Here are five of them, why they work, and the honest limits of each. None are secret, and all of them work on any strong model, but most people never use them. There’s a large gap between the answers Claude gives most people and the answers it is capable of giving, and the gap is almost entirely about how you ask. A model trained to be helpful and agreeable will, by default, give you something pleasant, balanced, and a little shallow, because that’s what a vague prompt rewards. The work happens when you override that default with a specific instruction about what you actually want. What follows are five short prompts that reliably change the quality of what comes back. I’m using Claude as the example because it responds well to this kind of direction, but none of these are Claude-specific tricks, they work on any capable model, and none of them are magic. They are just ways of telling the model to drop its defaults and do the more useful thing. Think of them less as cheat codes and more as the instructions the model was waiting for you to give. /brutal The single most useful instruction, because it fixes the most common failure. By default, a model leans toward encouragement. Ask it to review your business plan, your code, or your writing, and it will lead with what is good, soften every criticism, and leave you feeling better than your work probably deserves. That’s pleasant and nearly useless when you’re trying to improve something. The fix is to explicitly ask for the opposite. Tell it to be brutal, to skip the praise, to act as a harsh critic whose only job is to find what is wrong. A prompt like critique this as harshly as you can, assume it is flawed and find every weakness, no encouragement changes the entire character of the response. Instead of a supportive note, you get the actual problems, the weak argument, the unhandled edge case, the paragraph that does not work. The honest caveat is that it’ll find problems whether or not they are serious, because you told it to, so you have to weigh the critique rather than take every point as gospel. But a harsh review you filter is far more useful than a gentle one that told you nothing. When you genuinely want to make something better, this is the instruction that gets you there. /eli5 Short for explain it like I am five, and it’s the fastest way to actually understand something rather than receive a wall of jargon. Ask a model to explain a complex topic and it often answers at the level of the source material, dense, technical, full of terms that assume you already know the thing you are asking about. You end up with a correct answer you can’t use. Asking for an explanation as if you were five, or for a plain version with no jargon, forces a different mode. The model has to find the simple structure underneath the complexity, reach for an everyday analogy, and drop the vocabulary that was hiding the idea. Explain how a mortgage-backed security works like I am five produces something you will actually remember, where the technical version produces something you will reread three times and still not grasp. The limit is that simplification loses precision, an analogy is never the whole truth, so for anything you need to get exactly right you follow up and ask for the rigorous version once the basic shape is clear. Used as a first step, though, it’s the difference between understanding a thing and merely reading about it. Start simple, then add the detail back. /steelman The instruction that makes a model genuinely useful for thinking, because it forces it to argue against you well. When you ask whether your idea is good, or whether some position is right, the model tends to agree with the framing you handed it, especially if you have signaled which answer you want. That feels validating and teaches you nothing. Steelmanning is the opposite of a straw man. Instead of attacking the weakest version of a position, you ask the model to build the strongest possible version of it. Tell it to steelman the case against your plan, or to make the best argument an intelligent person on the other side would make. Now you are not getting agreement, you are getting the strongest opposition to your own view, which is the only thing that actually tests it. It’s the fastest way to find out whether your idea survives contact with a smart adversary, before a real one finds the hole. The caveat is to use it in both directions, steelman the side you disagree with to understand it, and steelman the side you agree with to see if the strong version holds up. The value is in the discomfort, a good steelman should make you slightly less sure of yourself, and that is the point. /missing Five words, and the closest thing to a blind-spot detector you’ve got. Most prompts ask the model to answer the question you posed. This one asks it to look at the question itself, at the things you did not think to ask, the assumptions baked into your framing, the option you never considered. It works because a model has a broad view of how problems like yours usually go wrong, and your framing is necessarily narrow, shaped by what you already know. Asking what am I missing here, or what would someone with more experience catch that I would not, pulls in the considerations outside your current view. You ask it to plan a product launch, then you ask what you are missing, and it surfaces the legal step, the support load, the dependency you forgot, the thing that was going to bite you in three weeks. The honest limit is that it can produce generic checklists if your context is thin, so the more of your actual situation you give it, the sharper the blind spots it finds. But even the generic version catches things, and the specific version regularly catches the one thing that mattered. It costs five words, and it’s worth asking on every plan you make. /10x The instruction that refuses the first answer, because the first answer is almost never the best one. A model gives you a reasonable response to your prompt and stops, because reasonable is what you asked for. It won’t, on its own, reach for the dramatically better version unless you tell it to. So you tell it to. After the first answer, push it, ask for a version ten times better, or tell it that response was a starting point and you want it to push much harder. This forces the model past its first, safe attempt into more ambitious territory, a bolder structure, a sharper angle, a more creative solution it would not have offered to a prompt that seemed satisfied with ordinary. The same is true going the other way, when an answer is overcomplicated, asking for the version ten times simpler strips it to what actually matters. The caveat is that more ambitious isn’t always better, sometimes the first answer was right and the pushed version is just louder, so you keep what genuinely improved and discard what only got bigger. But the habit of not accepting the first draft, of treating it as the opening move rather than the final word, is most of what separates people who get extraordinary output from people who get ordinary output. The model can almost always do better. You just have to ask. The pattern underneath all five Step back and these five are the same move in different clothes. Each one overrides a default. Be brutal overrides agreeableness. ELI5 overrides jargon. Steelman overrides validation. What am I missing overrides your narrow framing. 10x it overrides the first acceptable answer. A model left to its defaults gives you pleasant, balanced, jargon-tinged, first-draft, on-the-rails answers, because that’s the safe response to an unspecified request. Every one of these prompts is just you specifying the more useful thing instead. That’s the real lesson, and it’s bigger than any single prompt. The quality of what you get out of a model is mostly a function of how clearly you tell it what kind of answer you want. These five are a starting set, not a complete one, and once you see the pattern you will start writing your own. The model is usually capable of far more than its default gives you. These are simply five ways of asking for it. If you have your own prompt that reliably changes the quality of what you get back, drop it in the comments. The genuinely useful ones tend to be short, specific, and a little uncomfortable, and they spread by word of mouth more than any guide. 5 Prompts That Get Dramatically Better Answers Out of Claude was originally published in Towards AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
- Amazon Prime Day 2026 India: Dates, deals, AI shopping tools, and more
Amazon Prime Day 2026 India: Dates, deals, AI shopping tools, and more
- 360WiSE Replaces Claims With Receipts: Miami Credibility-Infrastructure Company Publishes a Dated, Reproducible Record of How AI Systems Describe It – and Invites Anyone to Check
360WiSE Replaces Claims With Receipts: Miami Credibility-Infrastructure Company Publishes a Dated, Reproducible Record of How AI Systems Describe It – and Invites Anyone to Check USA Today
- Why AV has become an IT conversation
The convergence of audiovisual systems and IT is set to change the role of technology teams within organisations, according to AV industry stakeholders speaking ahead of Mediatech Africa 2026.
Score: 24🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.itweb.co.za/article/why-av-has-become-an-it-conversation/8OKdWMDX2NkMbznQ - Enterprise Monkey wins UN AI for Good award: Next stop, Geneva
Not ALL bad for humanity - meet the Aussie startup using AI to better the world.
- After successfully selling over 15 cars, Faraday Future would now like you to buy its robots
Farday Future hasn't quite given up on EVs, but it's now also pitching a lineup of robots, including humanoids and a quadruped with an optional canine heads.
- The storage layer gets its own AI agent
How agentic AI in the new IBM FlashSystem generation is changing what enterprise storage can do without human intervention.
Score: 21🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.itweb.co.za/article/the-storage-layer-gets-its-own-ai-agent/wbrpOMg2n9b7DLZn - A 19-year-old Jordanian founder who sold his AI startup is already building his next company
A 19-year-old Jordanian founder who sold his AI startup is already building his next company Arabian Business
- Selflessly Reimagines Corporate Giving Around "Phil," an AI Assistant Built for Every Employee
Selflessly Reimagines Corporate Giving Around "Phil," an AI Assistant Built for Every Employee azcentral.com and The Arizona Republic
- CyLab researchers to present at ACM FAccT 2026
CyLab researchers to present at ACM FAccT 2026 Carnegie Mellon University
- Edward Jones starts offering financial monitoring from fintech Carefull
The Carefull tool integrated into Edward Jones accounts aggregates client accounts and monitors for fraud or mistakes.
Score: 20🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.americanbanker.com/news/edward-jones-starts-offering-financial-monitoring-from-fintech-carefull - I was wary of driverless cars and their tech overlords – but they could give me a different future | Gabriel Stewart
For those of us who can’t drive due to disabilities, the drawbacks of these vehicles are vastly outweighed by the possibilities they offer The robotaxis are coming! The robotaxis are coming! Well, actually, they’re already here. Until now they’ve been the stuff of science fiction, but this summer London’s streets have seen Silicon Valley-based company Waymo testing out self-driving cars. It hasn’t been the smoothest of introductions – from cars getting stuck in a cul-de-sac and repeatedly waking up the residents of Shoreditch to one driving into a crime scene , after a double stabbing in Harlesden. The automated vehicles (AVs) have so far had trained drivers waiting behind the wheel to take control if needed, but will soon be shedding their human minders. Waymo and British rival Wayve are hoping to launch driverless minicabs in the capital this year, subject to approval from the British government and Transport for London, among others. A subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, Waymo currently operates ride-hailing services in 10 US cities, but London, with its narrow streets and densely populated centre, will serve as one of its biggest challenges yet. Gabriel Stewart is a freelance writer and an intern on the Guardian’s positive action scheme Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here . Continue reading...
Score: 20🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/24/driverless-cars-tech-overlords-disabilities-vehicles - How to Build a Personal Brand with Google Gemini
How to Build a Personal Brand with Google Gemini The Information
Score: 20🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.theinformation.com/articles/build-personal-brand-google-gemini - Continuous Physics Reasoning: Definition, Minimum Criteria, and the Role of Foundation Models for Physics
A general-purpose system that reasons natively over physical structure with deterministic, solver-grade, out-of-the-box generality at manufacturing resolution. The post Continuous Physics Reasoning: Definition, Minimum Criteria, and the Role of Foundation Models for Physics appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering .
- The Sequence Knowledge #882: A New Series About Distillation
A deep dive into one of the most important techniques in modern AI.
- Stocks making the biggest moves midday: Cerebras Systems, KB Home, Expedia, Exxon Mobil & more
Here are the companies making headlines in midday trading.
Score: 18🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/24/stocks-making-the-biggest-moves-midday-cbrs-kbh-expe-xom.html - Narwal Flow 2 is one of the best robot vacuum + mop systems, and with a touch of class too
Robot vacuums have come a long way over the past several years, with some of the most advanced models nowadays going well and beyond anything we thought they’d be able to do. But, in a lot of cases, they’re also still an eyesore in your home. After spending a couple of months with the Narwal Flow 2, though, that’s one of the biggest things that stood out – I actually rather like how this looks, and it doesn’t give up top-tier performance to do so.
- DemoBook Says the AI Skills Gap Is a Watching Problem, Not an Information Problem
DemoBook Says the AI Skills Gap Is a Watching Problem, Not an Information Problem azcentral.com and The Arizona Republic
- I asked ChatGPT: How much emergency fund a family really needs in 2026, here what the math said
In 2026, a family in Noida should maintain an emergency fund of around ₹17 lakh, based on monthly expenses of ₹1.4 lakh. This amount provides a financial cushion for one year during unemployment, ensuring uninterrupted living costs.
- I asked ChatGPT if ₹5 crore is enough to retire in India. Here's what it said
A 45-year-old professional in Delhi estimates that ₹5 crore can support his retirement. With anticipated post-retirement expenses of approximately ₹15.8 lakh annually, the corpus exceeds this need, demonstrating the importance of calculating future expenses
- Context Windows Are Not Memory: What AI Agent Developers Need to Understand
In this article, you will learn why a large context window is not the same thing as agent memory, and how techniques like retrieval, compression,...
Score: 17🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://machinelearningmastery.com/context-windows-are-not-memory-what-ai-agent-developers-need-to-understand/ - Loop engineering, latest AI buzzword, still needs humans in the loop
Prompting less and automating more comes with a price
- ReFiBuy Launches RetailPlaybook Featuring Retailer Shopping Agent Optimization Expert Andrew Bell
ReFiBuy Launches RetailPlaybook Featuring Retailer Shopping Agent Optimization Expert Andrew Bell USA Today
- 16 Best Generative AI Coding Tools in 2026 Compared: Features, and Best Fit
16 Best Generative AI Coding Tools in 2026 Compared: Features, and Best Fit MarkTechPost
Score: 16🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/06/24/top-generative-ai-coding-tools-of-2026/ - The Brand Constructors Launches Webinar Series to Help US Contractors Navigate AI and SEO Changes
The Brand Constructors Launches Webinar Series to Help US Contractors Navigate AI and SEO Changes azcentral.com and The Arizona Republic
- Trust and accountability crucial to successful AI application, says BCX
BCX’s Garith Peck cautions against fast-tracking AI and entrusting the technology without due diligence, guardrails and proactive monitoring.
- Introducing Figma Motion: Your canvas now has a timeline
Motion now lives on the canvas—in the same file as your components, your variables, and your team—so your designs can come to life from day one.
- Connecting Figma and Weave
Today, we’re announcing new ways your Weave creative workflows can live alongside your Figma frames.
- When the Model Is Confident and Wrong: A Practitioner Guide to LLM Output Reliability
Hallucination is the wrong word for what I keep running into. It implies the model is confused or malfunctioning. The more accurate description is confident incorrectness: the model produces plausible-sounding output, in well-formed prose, citing nothing, with no hedging, and the claim is simply false. I have been building and operating an AI system that … continue reading The post When the Model Is Confident and Wrong: A Practitioner Guide to LLM Output Reliability appeared first on SD Times .
Score: 14🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://sdtimes.com/ai/when-the-model-is-confident-and-wrong-a-practitioner-guide-to-llm-output-reliability/ - Don’t Let the Model Grade its Own Homework
For a few years I have been the only tester on a back-end platform that seven teams push code into. The job gives you a narrow kind of paranoia. You stop trusting things that look fine, because the failures that wake you up almost always looked fine the day before they broke. So when I … continue reading The post Don’t Let the Model Grade its Own Homework appeared first on SD Times .
- Lead AI Application Engineer (Infrastructure & LLMOps)
Lead AI Application Engineer (Infrastructure & LLMOps) Built In
Score: 11🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://builtin.com/job/lead-ai-application-engineer-infrastructure-llmops/9877642 - Podcast: If AI Is Sentient Then So Is ‘Age of Empires II
A surreal but compelling LLM experiment with Age of Empires II; how a Texas city sold land meant for a park to a data center company; and the Madison Square Garden hack.
Score: 11🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.404media.co/podcast-if-ai-is-sentient-then-so-is-age-of-empires-ii/ - Latest AI News & Market Insights
Latest AI News & Market Insights PitchBook
- Monthly Roundup #43: June 2026
Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live. Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI. RIP FiveThirtyEight ABC and Disney completely take down FiveThirtyEight and all its articles , after telling Nate Silver they would refuse to sell it to him at any price because Nate had criticized their management of the brand. Nate Silver took this opportunity to reminisce and tell some stories about the old website, and the reasons the path of not seeking revenue and working with an entity too big to care ultimately doomed them. ‘What a bunch of assholes,’ indeed. I can grudgingly accept this sort of thing when it maximizes profits and the amount is meaningful, but this is different. Jack : This sort of digital arson is so frustrating. Pretty sure Dante had a place in mind for rights-holders who destroy valuable archives. Patrick McKenzie tries to justify this as it costing effort to keep a website afloat, and I do get that this is a thing, but in this case not so much. RIP Books Arnold Kling says we read fewer books because we should read fewer books, because alternatives have improved and opportunity costs are higher. Sounds right. I read a lot, but little of it is books. I’d like to read and review more books, but opportunity costs end up being too high. Dad books , as in serious nonfiction books especially ones that teach you about history or how things work, are in freefall. Kling is presumably right that this is due to superior alternatives. The danger is that substitution is largely instead into worse products, but mostly I don’t think the dads retained all that much from those books. I continue to be torn on whether my failure to read more books is a mistake. Bad News Texas BBQ restaurants, including historic ones , are closing due to high meat prices. I notice I am confused, as doubtless those in Texas know about the price changes, and beef is something like $6 (up from $3) wholesale and then the brisket costs $36 a pound, so even if the wholesale increase is 100% the price changes should be highly sympathetic and not that large. I especially don’t understand ‘line out the door and we have to limit brisket to one day a week because we don’t make money on it,’ but I’m just a basic econ guy. Yes, this seems like a fair summary of the tipping debate at this point. Mar G-O : All sides of the tipping debate are just matt : the biggest problem with tipping, because it’s a (barely) optional expense, is that is redistributes costs from anti social actors to pro social actors Is 90% of what you see on the internet fake, in the sense of being advertising in some form , often in disguise? Joe Lim, who ran a company called Floodify with 65,000 dummy social-media accounts available for rent, says so , and that essentially everyone does it, that everything viral results from a stealth marketing campaign. The article in question talks about this in the context of promotion of pop culture and politics. It makes sense that people would buy advertising in this way, since it is disguised and it is cheap and often you get a lot more views than you pay for. Lane Brown : A typical clipping campaign costs clients roughly a dollar per thousand views, what marketers call a $1 CPM. By comparison, a billboard might cost $10 per thousand estimated passersby; a TV spot can cost $30 or more per thousand viewers; a magazine ad can run even higher. An officially purchased TikTok ad, the kind labeled “Sponsored,” can cost ten times what a clipping campaign does, with the added disadvantage that its viewers will know they’re watching an ad. What to do about it? Instagram didn’t respond directly to me but did recently announce what looked like an oblique answer : The company would expand an existing rule so that “if you mostly share content from others that you didn’t make or meaningfully edit, your account won’t be recommended to people who don’t follow you.” The key word is mostly, and they have to detect this, but yes. That seems wise. I would set the threshold rather low to trigger something like that, and if a ‘clipping’ campaign involves multiple people posting the same clips it seems rather easy for the platform to detect this and deboost the posts or even the accounts. Mostly I don’t care about clipping, since if you choose to curate a feed that includes such things, that’s basically on you. The astroturfing of comments seems more toxic, but also don’t hate the player, hate the game, and don’t trust data you can’t trust. So does when people are doing this to attack others, rather than build themselves up. Mostly this is just pure ‘solve for the equilibrium’ and ‘people respond to incentives.’ As certain people would say, Build A Better Game. The game is remarkably resistant to such efforts, and reading this did not convince me the fakery was anything like 90%. For example, Brown mentions the fight over an ad campaign, where the claim is 15% of discussion was a paid campaign. That’s only 15%, and for a place with an unusual level of manipulation. Let’s not get carried away. The equilibrium is mostly not-ads, because you otherwise drive people away from platforms and invalidate the signal. Tyler Cowen presents new left-wing efforts at things like confiscatory taxation and even calls for violence as the even worse replacements of the negative side of wokeism. I don’t think that this is substitution of manifestation or reallocation of fixed social energies, if anything such things contribute to and inflame each other. I also think that attacking speech is in practice far worse, and got farther, so if this is the change for now at least I will take it. PayPal has escalated its anti-fun anti-freedom position, now permanently suspending artists for accepting lewd or adult commissions . Our institutions intentionally destroy records the moment they are legally cleared to do so, because not doing so only causes trouble. Might want to download all your bank statements. Good news is AI can look through them for you, if needed. Physical mail is in an insanely toxic place. AnechoicMedia : America’s postal system is a sort of negative lootbox where 99.9% of items are trash but the other 0.1% are special quest items that if not promptly handled result in crippling debts or your arrest. When you move, the system swiftly begins delivering the spam to your new location – even notifying paid sponsors of your change of address to serve new ads – but offers only a temporary, best-effort attempt to forward the critically important letters to your new address. The IRS will send the most important letter of your life, only once, to an address you lived at two jobs ago, with no confirmation or follow up, until the problem has metastasized into a crisis. At least private collectors hound you with calls like they actually want your money. jesus christ the IRS will mail you a letter saying you need to pay a penalty with daily interest and direct you to their website which DOESN’T TELL YOU HOW MUCH YOU OWE THEM The IRS has exactly zero of its act together on so many levels, and the number of ways I need to fix their dumb mistakes and misunderstandings keeps multiplying. There clearly isn’t any malice, but it’s crazy, and the hotline to call for some of them literally just says they’re too busy and hangs up on me every time I try to call them. It has indeed become more difficult to befriend others with different politics than it was 10 or especially 20 years ago. I and Timothy Lee are willing to mostly agree to disagree on such matters, but people largely aren’t like that anymore, and demand that you match their views and their level of outrage on hot button issues. The difference is that Lee thinks it’s still getting worse, whereas I thought this peaked in 2020-2021. Trader sentenced to prison for telling the truth , and then exiting his positions when the price moved. In this particular case, I do get it, given he would exit his full position within minutes or hours of revealing his information. But you could fairly say that this means his information and opinion is priced in, so why should he have an opinion after that? The counterargument is that he was giving a false impression that he would not exit so quickly, or that he held a stronger opinion. I disagree but can see it if I squint, in this particular case, but once you go down this road everyone talking their book is at the political whim of a prosecutor, and short sellers being allowed to talk their books is a vital part of a well-functioning market. At minimum we need to offer safe harbor after some period of time (e.g. 24 hours) or if it passes your named target price. Uber and similar services continue to hill climb towards systematically lying to their customers about time estimates. Long term this has huge deadweight loss and destroys trust, but that accumulates over time so the A/B test says to do it. Good Advice If you are applying for a job, respond to them as quickly as possible . It substantially improves your chances. I can confirm this study from the perspective of the employer, it definitely made a difference in how I viewed candidates. The studies continue to show that walking generates more ideas than sitting , and it is the movement that matters, and we now understand the mechanism, yet few of us take advantage, myself included. The good news is you only need 15 minutes and the creative mode sustains afterwards, so I get around this by going out to grab breakfast. My friend Seth Burn recommends this firm pillow . If you want to cook at home you need to accept you will be throwing food out , and do so well before it becomes highly unpleasant to finally throw it out. Worry about food waste in terms of the costs, but don’t treat it as some sinful outcome and don’t force yourself to eat things that are no longer good, or never were. I also endorse ‘start with some basic things, do each a bunch of times, and build from there.’ Think like this: s. ceren (FEMMEPATH) : This concept changed my brain chemistry entirely. Every time I’m anxious I just keep repeating “don’t suffer twice” cuz literally why the fuck would I do that Definitely do not think like this from Tinzann: This is also importantly wrong in many cases: Robin Hanson : The usual argument is that if you suffer more via worry, you lower the chances of suffering in other ways. Worry can be useful in general, because it causes you to do things that avoid things that cause worry, or do things that cause you to not have to worry, and offers good reinforcement learning feedback. You probably wouldn’t want to worry never. But when you notice further worry does not impact the outcome, stop worrying. Another tactic is to notice you would be inclined to worry if you were someone who worries (Buddhism style), to inform your actions, but not actually worry. When you have a simple thing to say, best say it simply: David Hines : Best tip I’ve found for getting back to sleep when you wake up in the middle of the night is something I saw on Japanese twitter: close your eyes and look left and right repeatedly, faking REM; your brain will go “oh yeah right we’re supposed to be asleep when we’re doing that” Rabble With A Cause : My favorite trick is to start at my toes and flex individual groups of muscles and hold for five seconds, then release, until my entire body has been relaxed. I’ve never made it above my waist before I’m asleep. @ben_r_hoffman : I just have a spoonful of raw honey and try to tune into phantom sounds (basically voluntary tinnitus), and eventually phantom images if they appear before I’m fully asleep. @ben_r_hoffman : See, this is why I find so much writing on meditation, yogic states, etc even by rationalist-adjacent types so alienating; to get across this very simple point they’d write ten thousand words introducing a hundred unusual terms and seven distinct claims of metaphysical privilege. There at other times is value in understanding why it works on a deeper level, but mostly nah, it’s fine. With notably rare exceptions, the chance of any kid going pro in sports should be treated as approximately zero , no matter how talented. Even going for a college scholarship is a rough ask. That doesn’t mean don’t play sports, sports are great, but maybe don’t take them too seriously as a life plan Captain B Zar : This is written by a parent of a child that bats last on his house league team.. Jacob Turner : A PARENT’S JOURNEY THROUGH YOUTH SPORTS: Age 5: “He’s got a cannon.” Age 6: “He’s the fastest kid out there. Coach said so.” Age 7: “Rec ball isn’t challenging him anymore.” Age 8: “We tried out for select. Obviously made it.” Age 9: “$2,800 for the season. Plus uniforms. Plus tournaments. Plus hotels.” Age 10: “Cooperstown is basically a family vacation, right?” Age 11: “He needs a hitting guy. And a pitching guy. And probably a mental performance coach.” Age 12: “I’m not a crazy sports parent. The OTHER parents are crazy.” Age 13: “We changed schools. For academics. (And also baseball.)” Age 14: “Showcases are a requirement at this age.” Age 15: “Ya his ranking just ticked up. We’re cooking.” Age 16: “He just needs to get seen by the right school.” Age 17: “The D1 schools want him to walk on. He’ll earn a spot by sophomore year.” Age 18: “Okay, D2 is actually really competitive.” Age 19: “He’s redshirting. Strategic.” Age 20: “He’s focusing on school now.” Age 21: “You know what? He’s so much happier.” Roughly 7% of high schoolers play in college. About 1.5% of those get drafted. Less than half of draftees even play one day in the big leagues. The odds of our kids going pro are somewhere between “struck by lightning” and “find a $100 in old shorts.” I love youth sports (all my kids play a bunch of them) just keep a good perspective my friends. Captain B Zar : This is written by a parent of a child that bats last on his house league team. Jacob Turner : This is written by a parent who was a top 10 pick, played pro baseball for 11 years and has four pretty dang athletic kids. Basic hotel requirements, reminder that there is a purely correct take: Joe Weisenthal : I don’t have expensive tastes or any particular desire for luxury. But I’ve done a lot of travel this year, and I’ve concluded there are three things I want a hotel room to have: – Blackout curtains – Power outlets next to the bed – One button to turn off all the lights. I would add a reasonably comfy bed and a TV that lets you use your streaming services, and not having any horrible problems (everything works, nothing is dirty, no major outside sounds, etc), and ideally a useable desk workspace and decent chairs. But in practice, 80% of hotel room value is whether your curtains work. That’s it. If you are thinking you’ll suddenly pursue your unconventional dreams once you make more money, and don’t have a specific threshold or plan, you are probably wrong. Ben Landau-Taylor : Approximately nobody will finally pursue their unconventional dreams once they finally amass enough wealth and prestige. The barrier isn’t resources, the barrier is that it’s unconventional. 98% of the weirdos I know were pursuing their weird dreams as broke 24-year-olds. Richard Ngo : AGI company employees should explicitly ask “how much wealth and prestige would I need to be comfortable leaving to do something unconventional?” Because the actual answer is usually either “a level I already have” or “always more than I have”, which should prompt reflection. Jackson Kernion : What’s your wealth number? Richard Ngo : I felt much more spacious after I had $2M in my bank account, even though my nominal wealth had been higher than that for a while. At that point it became much harder to find excuses for trading off against independence. This is ignoring the question of whether working for that AGI company or other conventional job is increasing existential risk or otherwise actively a bad thing, or whether there is some moral imperative in the thing you want to do instead. It could just be a thing you want to do. Opportunity Knocks Would you like to buy or help buy Hampshire College ? I’m not rich enough, but if I had a billion dollars (okay, maybe if I had ten billion) I’d definitely investigate. It would be really cool on many levels to own a college, and the place sounds neat. Tyler Cowen is a fan of 80,000 Hours: The Book , calling it ‘the one book that really matters.’ I have not had the hours (ha!) to read the book, but I do worry the thinking is growing rapidly obsolete. Many Americans are moving abroad, to places like Portugal , causing net emigration out of America, because they can still earn American salaries and then have their dollar go a lot farther. Lower Awareness Awareness, by default, makes a lot of mental health problems worse via identification. We have known this for a while. This is especially true on the margin. If you have the extreme version of the thing that most benefits from identification and intervention, chances are you knew about it. If you have the version that is mild where getting in your head likely only makes it worse and you want to avoid identifying with it, you might not want that new awareness. I am very grateful that I did not get encouraged to put various labels on my behaviors when I was younger. I believe it would have made my situation vastly worse. Michael Inzlicht : Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five “signs you have undiagnosed anxiety.” She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she’s describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she’s avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled “Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem”, we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like “wind turbine syndrome” produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper [here] . Robin Hanson : A key modern bad trend: “Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.” sarah : People are doing this with autism like nothing else The New York Times Has Some Issues Scott Aaronson declares the New York Times and all associated reporters persona non grata in the wake of how they handled the obviously fake dog rape story. I notice I am still willing to write for them if the opportunity arises, but yeah, this was pretty terrible, much worse than what happened with Cade Metz and Scott Alexander, and it’s hard to think of them as still being the paper of record. Liar Liar A surprisingly useful question, if you can say it in a way that makes it clear you are not angry and are offering them an out: “Are you lying to me right now?” Defender of the Defender(s) : “are you lying to me right now?” is a surprisingly good technique for spotting manipulation. You can ask it in good faith. Sometimes people lie because they’re scared. Asking them to double check if they want to be lying right now can trigger an exhaust valve ben hsieh : the main reason this would work on me is that a lot of people seem to be begging to be lied to, and it would give me permission to stop doing that (pretty much only lying by omission, but even so). boy⁷ : if i know someone is lying i usually ask “are you sure?” and if they backtrack i don’t hold it against them. if they doubledown on the lie im pissssseddddd This is counterintuitive, since the obvious answer is ‘no’ in all cases, but actually the question can do a lot of work. Here are some ways I might use it, with obvious risks involved, including that my question might effectively be a lie in its own way: Common knowledge that I want a truthful answer. You might think it is socially appropriate to lie here, or I was asking you to lie, or that you needed to say the polite thing, or I was asking pro forma. I am clarifying that I want you to tell me the real answer. And if you backtrack now, you’re saying that this lack of common knowledge is why you didn’t tell the truth, and I’m promising to give you grace A way to look for tells, by forcing you to double down and seeing your reaction. A way to signal both that you suspect (or perhaps outright know) they are lying, and you would forgive (or partially forgive) them admitting to the lie now, and/or would be extra pissed if they double down on it. This can, if presented properly, be a signal that the cost if caught lying about this, or the consequences for it not being true if relied upon, are actually very high, perhaps way, way higher than you might have thought. Are you sure? Or simply to signal to them and others that you are for sure not calling them a liar, just don’t lie to me, also yes you are basically calling them a liar. A way to get it on the record that they really are making the claim. A way to get them to affirm their promise or claim, and thus make them a lot more motivated to act on it or make it true. A way to point out that you might be lying reflectively, and you should ponder. A way to point out that you might be wrong about your true beliefs or intentions, or ability to keep a promise or deal, and you should stop to ponder that. A way to let people without credibility establish local credibility, by letting them risk their One Time. Up to a point, even if you’re a Well Known Liar with zero baseline credibility, so long as you haven’t been lying about whether you are lying, you can get credibility by claiming you are not lying about a particular thing. This works because once you burn this, it is gone. Conspiracy Theory Conspiracy theories will on average be about as well executed as other similarly sized concerted actions. That mostly rules out some theories, and does not rule out others. It also avoids the problem of assuming ‘all conspiracy theories are false’ since that gives too much power to those deciding what counts as a conspiracy theory, and will occasionally be importantly wrong. Good News, Everyone Jacobin runs a remarkably good critique of central planning . Putin has spent $26 billion on longevity research . Imagine if he had better taste. For Your Entertainment Lupita Nyong’o had a Yale masters in drama and ‘ had no idea what The Odyssey was .’ It is Love Island USA season. I have very much been enjoying watching it in real time, but have lacked the bandwidth to write it up. Before that started I was able to see the movie Obsession, which I don’t think is an all-time great or anything but I do think there are reasons it qualifies as a must see. Between Love Island USA, LessOnline and everything surrounding Fable, I have not had time to watch much else, or almost any movies, or play any games, which is not sustainable in the long term for me, so I’m writing this down to remind myself of that. I finally watched Euphoria, which might be the show that goes the hardest of all time. It can be a rather hard watch, but hot damn on so many levels. My thoughts are in many ways close to this writeup . The end of the third season and especially the last episode is, despite being very well shot and acted, quite frankly, mostly belabored anvilicious self-indulgent wish fulfillment, which keeps Euphoria out of Tier 1, but I still have it squarely in Tier 2 (Worth It), and I’m still very happy Season 3 exists. LessOnline was, as expected a great experience, and I was sad I was unable to stay for Summer Camp and Manifest (or try out going to VibeCamp?), but duty calls. I highly recommend pretty much any event at Lighthaven, on both the serious and fun tracks. A Matter of Taste Scott Alexander is Contra Everyone On Taste , complete with saying that the critic thing where you evaluate on many aspects of art at once and frame it in historical context is bad because if different things have the same name they can’t all survive. In particular, he insists on a distinction between the philosophical point-scoring game and the creating-beautiful-things game. Also a lot of other strong opinions. I definitely think we should when relevant draw distinctions between different aspects of a work of art (of whatever medium). If I had to pick four, there’s Quality of the work, there’s the novelty or philosophical or educational aspect of the work, there’s cultural relevance and place in history, there’s whether it’s actually tasty or beautiful or enjoyable. If I pick two, it’s Quality versus enjoyment. There is also a time to pick one. It is good and right that ultimately one must offer the verdict. Where is this restaurant, from 0.0 to 10.0? Where is this movie from 0 to 5 stars? You must choose, and you must combine all of these things, and that includes deciding what you care about in each instance. You can be great in many different ways. You can, as I have, claim that the best movie of 2025 is Resurrection and the second best was The Naked Gun, followed by Thunderbolts*, Bogunia and Companion. Very obviously I am not measuring one fully unified thing there. And we can each have distinct scales, and that is fine. I will say, we do not have enough things of the form ‘boomer from Ohio mass producing awe-inducing statues for dentists offices.’ We need to be creating a lot more actually beautiful and pleasing and fun and good-to-be-around-or-experience things, even if they are deeply unoriginal and those with ‘taste’ find them lame. Give me more of the food that tastes good, broadly construed, although not exclusively. The periodic ‘best episodes of TV’ thread is back . Fun as always. Way too much love for Battle of the Bastards, and too many episodes that don’t work as movies because they depend on your existing investment in the show. The episode of TV that impacted me the most was not mentioned, and also does not work at all unless you know and are invested in what has already happened. In the little-considered comedy category I know it is not the right answer but I will always have a soft spot for The One Where Everyone Finds Out. Scott then follows this up with additional explorations of taste . He starts with rules for flags, where yes you should mostly follow the rules but I notice I don’t care. He then talks about movie plot holes, where this mostly isn’t even subjective. The subjective part is how much we should care in a given case, and when Rule of Fun should largely overrule it, but yeah if your comic says Ultra-Man can shoot 1,000 feet and then you show him shooting 1,250 feet down you’d better at least handwave it or I’m docking you at least some points, and if something is actually a load bearing plot hole or otherwise a larger violation I’m docking a lot. The rules must be consistent. If you don’t dock points for it then I’m docking for that, too. Then Scott admits that yes, some tech company names are good, others are bad, and it matters. So that’s a start, at least. He finishes with Nostalgebraists Hydrogen Jukeboxes , which analyzes AI writing as using a limited set of gimmicks and patterns and cliches that locally impress people, similar to how some Kenyans were taught a related bag of tricks, complete with instruction to start each piece with a saying or other cliche. For any given passage it works, but with too much exposure you quickly develop an immunity through repetition, and there is no there there. That, Alexander asserts, is the essence of poor taste, the overuse of cheap and easy and generally overused particular choices and tricks. Good taste is avoiding this, staying fresh and unique in details. If you haven’t been overexposed yet, there is nothing wrong with ‘poor taste.’ That first paragraph, on its own, is pretty good. The cliche wasn’t a cliche the first time. That means that something being ‘poor taste’ in this sense is a function of your level of exposure. So the house on the left is really loud and obnoxious and unpleasant if every house is like that, and you’d eventually grow tired of it, but if such places are rare, it’s super cool. Whereas the house on the right is subtle, it has taste, it has high perplexity. The problem is it is also ugly. This is not a complete theory of taste, but it is a theory of one key aspect of taste. I appreciate that. Taste is in part about ‘staying ahead of’ the overuse of tropes and cliches. If you’re targeting only children or those new to the genre or style then you largely don’t ‘need’ this type of taste, whereas if you appeal to experts you need a lot. A theory of nostalgia, or of older creations being ‘grandfathered in,’ is that they largely get a pass for what would, now, be a lack of taste. Super Mario Bros. is original because it is the original. If you echo it, you’re not. The Taj Mahal gets to look like the Taj Mahal, whereas your version is tacky. The music you hear at age 17 is awesome. My guess is this is something like 50%-75% of taste, depending on how expansively this includes the ability to find the new things and figure out which old things are also busted. It is pretty good at avoiding actively bad taste. It is not sufficient, on its own, to give you actively good taste, or for something to be good. There has to be an actual Quality and value to the thing, on various levels, and you need to be able to see that. This taste can also be extended to richness, and the ability to operate on multiple levels. Bluey is good, and is good taste, because it has proper Parental Bonus and tackles real things in real ways, on top of being good at the things children notice. That is, I think, the place I most differ with many of those who claim great taste. They say that something in great taste cannot also be less filling. It cannot be appealing to the masses who don’t know any better. I say the opposite. I say that for something to be in truly great taste, it must also be less filling. To reach for greatness, you must be good at first glance, good for the novice, good for the perplexed, and also reward rich repeated engagement and the eye of the expert. It is additive. If you are great in the abstract and can be appreciated by those who have seen it all, but you are ‘difficult’ and require focus and active engagement, that’s not as great, and not in as good taste, and also means you were in Easy Mode. Art being ugly matters. I have the eyes of ‘good taste’, sometimes, but I want to also keep the eyes of a child . If you do your job, then someone who doesn’t pay really close attention will miss most of the jokes, but will have a good time anyway. Other times, sure, you’re creating Euphoria, and the children of all types need to look away. But that’s a cost, not a benefit. Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game The Library of Leng , an archive of Magic: The Gathering articles from times past. A lot of gamers who like the NBA got a lot of fun out of 82-0 drafting teams of all-time greats. I go on a podcast with my old friend and teammate Justin Gary to talk many things. Good times, man. Good times. Civilization VII gives up its most unique feature, allows players to play as one civilization the entire game . They did not have much choice given (predictable) player reactions, but this makes me sad, when a game makes a unique bold bet, builds around it, and then tries to rip the bold bet out. See Master of Orion 3, with a brilliant initial design document where the game was designed to be unplayable by hand, then they let and made you play it by hand, so then the game was unplayable. Better to go down with the ship and try again next time. I still haven’t played Civilization VII, which is not something I would have predicted, but I do plan to when I next have that kind of time. Which might be never, who knows. Steam moves from generic ‘NSFW’ labels to focus on tags like sexual content and gore along with a broader revamp. That seems better. Some people actively want one but not the other, and you can basically never have too many descriptive tags. The ones they removed do seem mostly like they are not so useful. I get the thinking here from master game designers , that if too many people like your game then you are catering to expectations too much and you need to be bolder. The key is to use this as an opportunity to do something cool, it shows you have points you can spend. Edutainment products, or ‘gamifying’ learning , is usually the worst of both worlds. You get very little entertainment, and very little learning. I have seen this as well. You either want a game that’s actively fun that naturally teaches you along the way, like Kelsey Piper’s examples of Opus Magnum or Crusader Kings, or a classic like Oregon Trail, or you want to do explicit learning like Khan Academy and find your motivation somewhere else. I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars A new paper analyzes the potential of self-driving trucks . If you assume full L4/L5 adoption nationwide, with no driver, this is estimated to reduce shipping costs 35%. They then model trade flows, but not the impact of this on jobs or GDP or prices. My guess is this underestimates impact of full driverless systems because cost reductions don’t include the increased flexibility involved especially after adjustments, but also we are not going to get this full diffusion for a while. Waymo continues to feel a legal obligation to exclude riders under 18 , despite the case for underage riders being actively stronger since they often cannot themselves drive and the Waymo is safer both from accidents and people than using an Uber or a bus. Apparently this means Waymo feels obligated to profile, such as wolfie’s 27 year old girlfriend being denied service on this basis. And yes, in California a 17-year-old can drive their own car, but not ride a Waymo . Sports Go Sports Congratulations to my good old New York Knicks. We finally did it, in rather absurd fashion. I wish I had been able to experience more of it in real time, but it is so tough when you don’t people to watch it with and you’re pressed for time. Legalized sports betting reduces household food sufficiency by 2.1% among working-age adults without a college degree, or by 10.5% among active gamblers. Yikes. Government Working The President of the United States did some insider trading, as a treat . Greece imposed price controls on domestic 500ml water bottles that did not adjust with time, so now you can only buy 750ml water bottles , or foreign water. It is scary to see serious proposals for price controls on food, for reasons I need not explain. What should we do about jawboning ? Adam Thierer suggests incremental reforms that might help, but that I notice wouldn’t solve the biggest jawboning issues, such as the dispute between DoW and Anthropic. We need to end ballot propositions . Ten percent less democracy and all that. In this case, DC might vote on freezing all the rents for two years. Yeah, don’t allow that. The UK bans social media unless you have your identity confirmed and are over 16 . This initially did not include BlueSky, but they amended that quickly. It does include Reddit, Twitch and YouTube. Prove your identity to use YouTube, what a country. Ranty Man : It’s important to know that the social media ban for under 16s is not a ban for under 16s. It is a ban on *selected* social media for EVERYONE. Until you identify yourself. Arthur B. : The blackest pill about the UK social media ban is how popular it is. 70% to 80% support among adults in the UK. Regardless of the harm it causes, it’s a sad reminder that things are bad not because of a few bad politicians but because people fundamentally hold horrible policy preferences. Alessandro Riolo : Upon learning of Starmer’s crusade against children under 16 watching YouTube, my 10-year-old son commented: “He’s proposing it now because his own children have just turned 16.” This surprised me, as I wasn’t even aware or remembering he had children. I looked it up and apparently he has two, born in 2008 and, crucially, 2010! So far, I found it the most revealing comment I heard about the whole shebang. If they had excluded YouTube this would be a similarly terrible idea, but its terribleness would be less obvious. The people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard. It seems fairly obvious that such bans are a breach of agreements like the ECHR, if anyone actually took that seriously when power found it inconvenient. How well do controls work ? A new paper finds that if you ban porn , then for every 100 hours previously spent on adult sites, 50 never restrict access, 30 persist through VPNs and 10 move from compliant to noncompliant sites. Only 10 go away entirely. Jones Act Watch Texas and California are the big winners from the waiver by total size, Alaska by capita. The losers are… not even the private rent seekers, because right now the world has a shortage of ships and no one even lost any business, even the Jones Act fleet remains economical. The ‘conservative influencers suddenly interested in preserving the Jones Act’ club . AMP Maritime is falling back on pure non sequiturs to defend the Jones Act. The results of the Jones Act waiver are in , it was a pure win, all current Jones Act ships remained employed, and Chinese ships were only 8% of the total. Here Colin Grabow has Chinese ships as 11% of all movements . Here is an official Jones Act Waiver Tracker from CATO. Humans Can Be Strategic Did you know you can choose to think ahead to maximize long term profits? Alex Tabarrok documented that what he calls ‘a beautiful theory’ has fallen to ‘ugly data.’ Coase had a fun but deeply silly hypothesis that a monopoly had little value, because in time period 1 you would sell to everyone at the monopoly price, but having saturated that market you would then lower the price, and then do it again, and do this all quickly, until price was equal to marginal cost (plus epsilon, one hopes). Except obviously no. That is stupid. The monopolist would not do that, because the alternative path maximizes profits. And indeed, the paper, by Tabarrok and Groseclose, decisively rejects the Coase Conjecture using electronic book prices. Publishers of books don’t quickly lower the price to ~$0, due to that being an obviously stupid thing to do. It is an even stupider thing to do than Alex describes, because once you anticipate future price drops you will postpone your purchase. Games are a place where a soft form of this indeed happens. If you wait, prices drop, first with sales then with base prices, and you can get games at large discounts, often 90%+ discounts after a few years. If you’re not playing socially on any level and care about prices, there’s basically no good reason not to do this, and many gamers know this. It is a form of time-based price discrimination, but it is a slow deterioration, and borne of other games being imperfect but good substitutes in many cases. Does the gaming regime maximize profits? I think no. You’d make more money if you could credibly commit to not discounting, or not doing so for a long time, but this simply is not credible. I’ll still buy games at full retail price sometimes, but I need to be very excited, and I often feel dumb soon after. Variously Effective Altruism If you have multiple outlier negative interactions with someone, and especially if they keep endlessly arguing with you when you give them lesser reprimands, then without a very large compensating upside yes you probably need to basically ban them from everything you can ban them from. Also, yes, it is almost never right to amplify the worst things, that would otherwise remain buried, in order to complain about them, and especially to complain that the buried thing wasn’t formally censored. Has Streisand taught you nothing. Also one should go to great lengths to avoid outright censorship in places like LessWrong. I’ve started to delete reported pure AI slop comments that add nothing whatsoever to the discussion, because at this point you have to, but my bar for deleting things that actually say something is very high. I still can’t believe that places like France ban giving your fortune to charity and then complain about inequality. One thorny question is allocating credit for impact , charitably or otherwise. Can you do better than Shapley values? What are the right counterfactuals? I think largely people end up asking wrong questions, and the general correct form is ‘use good decision theory’ and trying to pick and credit the right algorithms. Support Anti-Aging Research I have no idea if this particular technology is actually good, but I am excited to see them raise mid-nine figures to try it out. NewLimit : Following breakthrough results, we’re bringing longevity medicine to human trials. We’ve raised a $435M Series C led by @foundersfund to make it happen. Reprogramming cell age has the potential to create more healthy years for everyone. We’re closer than ever to realizing it. Brian Armstrong : Aging is arguably the root cause of most major diseases (loss of function in our cells). Four years ago, we made a bet that aging was treatable, and NewLimit was born. NewLimit now has a prototype drug that reverses the age of some human cells (restores function they had when they were younger), and a clinical trial scheduled for next year (with more drug candidates in the pipeline). Grateful to Founders Fund, Thrive, Greenoaks, and the rest of the investors for this latest round. @jacobkimmel and the team are just getting started. The Lighter Side Don’t you want to show your support? Alexander Leishman : hilarious phishing email I just got. 10/10 execution Brandon | Bitcoin, AI, Longevity : “Click this link or you’re gay” Fleeting Yeets : I got a similar one, but ragebaiting ICE support Think about what we could accomplish if we worked together. OSINTtechnical : One reason the US is considering acquiring Greenland is to secure access to seafood that could potentially bring back unlimited shrimp at Red Lobster. – US official to the New Yorker Discuss
Score: 10🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Taa4zmSNtD5S99tJT/monthly-roundup-43-june-2026 - How Ashirvad CIO Vipin Rustagi built a digital benchmark in an industry late to technology
Manufacturing has spent the last decade chasing isolated wins — a smarter machine here, a digitized workflow there — while true enterprise-wide transformation remained out of reach for most. PVC and pipe manufacturing has long been one of the slower movers in this shift. But Ashirvad by Aliaxis, part of the Belgium-headquartered Aliaxis Group, has used that gap as an opportunity rather than a liability. Under CIO Vipin Rustagi, the company has moved from being merely digitized to genuinely data-driven — building a model that other manufacturing leaders are now studying closely The post How Ashirvad CIO Vipin Rustagi built a digital benchmark in an industry late to technology appeared first on Express Computer .
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Score: 10🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.salesforce.com/blog/slack-salesforce-integrations-architects/ - ToltIQ Partners with PitchBook to Bring Private Markets Intelligence Into Diligence Workflows
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Score: 08🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-meta-arena-prediction-market-app/ - Principles in motion
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- SaffronStays raises $3.5 Mn led by Infinity Ventures
Managed holiday-home platform SaffronStays has raised $3.5 million in a funding round led by Infinity Ventures, with participation from family offices. The round included fresh primary capital and a partial secondary sale by existing investor Sixth Sense Ventures. Founded in 2015 by Tejas Parulekar and Devendra Parulekar, SaffronStays operates a network of managed villas, heritage homes, and vacation properties across India. The Mumbai-based startup will use the funds to expand across existing and new leisure destinations, invest in technology and product development, enhance guest experiences, and grow its portfolio of managed homes. SaffronStays currently manages over 450 properties across more than 80 destinations, including Maharashtra, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Rajasthan, and Delhi NCR. According to the company, inventory in its focus markets grew 70% in North India, 90% in South India, and 200% in Goa over the last two financial years. The startup claims that it has remained profitable for four consecutive years. More than half of its revenue now comes from premium homes, while direct bookings contribute nearly 70% of overall business. SaffronStays plans to strengthen its presence in the premium and experiential hospitality segment, focusing on curated stays, destination-led experiences, family vacations, celebrations, and corporate offsites. The company also partners with homeowners to manage and monetise second homes through its hospitality management platform.
Score: 05💰 MoneyJun 24, 2026https://entrackr.com/snippets/saffronstays-raises-35-mn-led-by-infinity-ventures-12068176 - Failing Robot Cop Company Knightscope Now Publishing Bizarre AI Slop Fan Fiction About Its Robots Solving Absurd Crimes
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Score: 05🌐 MovesJun 24, 2026https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/knightscope-robot-cop-company-fan-fiction - The Mapping Software Behind America’s Viral Maps Just Got Faster and Smarter
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