Anthropic accuses DeepSeek and other Chinese firms of using Claude to train their AI by Emma Roth

DeepSeek, which caused a stir in the AI industry for its powerful but more efficient models, held over 150,000 exchanges with Claude and targeted its reasoning capabilities, according to Anthropic. It’s also accused of using Claude to generate “censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism.” In a letter to lawmakers last week, OpenAI similarly accused DeepSeek of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other U.S. frontier labs.”

I remember there being similar comments being made when Deepseek had first come out. But hey, you did not ask for permission when you trained on the world’s data.

All this fear mongering and for what?

Also, I’m in a weird position re: Anthropic. I use the Pro plan and am their customer. With the way things are you are bound to feel some sense of loyalty toward the company. You may feel the need to defend them. They’re better than OpenAI!

Not really.

The way these companies have built their tools is generally shitty. The products are useful though. Make of that what you will. I had read recently a post by Cory Doctorow which talked about this.

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:

That’s where I stand. My dream is to be able to run these tools locally. I don’t want to send my data out to these companies.

'There’s still plenty of life left in lithium-ion battery technology': researchers make gel electrolyte breakthrough that could boost EV range and safety

Researchers at the Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science claim to have developed a new gel electrolyte that will help stabilize anode-free lithium-ion batteries. This should improve the safety and longevity of this emerging battery technology, while presenting a cost-saving to manufacturers.

Range anxiety and battery longevity are real issues that need to be fixed. Any progress is welcome here.

Nothing couldn’t wait to show off the Phone 4A by Jess Weatherbed

After teasing the upcoming launch of its midrange Phone 4A last week, Nothing has now revealed what the rear of the device looks like. An official render of the Phone 4A shared on X shows off the brand's familiar transparent-industrial stylings, alongside a new "Glyph Bar" lighting feature located to the right of the triple camera island.

Always tempted by the design of this phone. If I ever switch over to the Android side, I will be going with a Pixel though.

Write-Only Code | Heavybit

Much as humans no longer shell into individual production servers, I believe we will develop similar practices around unread code. Over time, we will treat “humans had to read this to be comfortable” as a smell in our code generation pipeline, or as an explicit, expensive trade-off reserved for truly mission-critical subsystems. A natural outcome of this shift is a “code reading coverage” metric, tracked much like test coverage. What fraction of production code has actually been read by humans, partly as a safety signal, and partly as a metric teams deliberately and safely work to drive downward toward an asymptote.

Allow me to introduce the two-sentence journal by

I would aim to constrain each day's entry to one or two key things, and limit their expression to one or two sentences.

An interesting idea this. I am a believer in constraints. But not this constraint.

I do most of my writing in Obsidian. Space is not at a constraint here. I can write whatever, and however long I want to. And I do.

I do like the idea of diluting and thinking about whatever happened in the day though.