Included in the search and seizure warrant for the raid on Natanson’s home is a section titled “Biometric Unlock,” which explicitly authorized law enforcement personnel to obtain Natanson’s phone and both hold the device in front of her face and to forcibly use her fingers to unlock it. In other words, a judge gave the FBI permission to attempt to bypass biometrics: the convenient shortcuts that let you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint or face.

OpenAI recently introduced their bespoke in-house AI data agent, a GPT-5.2-powered tool designed to help employees navigate and analyze over 600 petabytes of internal data across 70,000 datasets. By translating natural language questions into complex data insights in minutes, the agent enables teams across the company to bypass manual SQL debugging and quickly make data-driven decisions.

Meanwhile, longtime government contractor Palantir was paid $30 million to extend a contract to build a system designed to locate people flagged for deportation. On Wednesday, the Trump administration disclosed it’s using Palantir’s AI models to sift through immigration enforcement tips submitted to its tip line.

TikTok users in the US have reported being unable to write the word ‘Epstein’ in messages amid accusations that the social media platform is suppressing content critical of President Donald Trump.

"China reportedly coordinated the whole operation," the post reads. "The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet."

This list bridges the Transformer foundations
with the reasoning, MoE, and agentic shift

Recommended Reading Order

1. Attention Is All You Need (Vaswani et al., 2017)

   The original Transformer paper. Covers self-attention,
   multi-head attention, and the encoder-decoder structure
   (even though most modern LLMs are decoder-only.)

2. The Illustrated Transformer (Jay Alammar, 2018)

   Great intuition builder for understanding
   attention and tensor flow before diving into implementations

3. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers (Devlin et al., 2018)

   Encoder-side fundamentals, masked language modeling,
   and representation learning that still shape modern architectures

4. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (GPT-3) (Brown et al., 2020)

   Established in-context learning as a real
   capability and shifted how prompting is understood

5. Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (Kaplan et al., 2020)

   First clean empirical scaling framework for parameters, data, and compute
   Read alongside Chinchilla to understand why most models were undertrained

6. Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (Chinchilla) (Hoffmann et al., 2022)

   Demonstrated that token count matters more than
   parameter count for a fixed compute budget

7. LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models (Touvron et al., 2023)

   The paper that triggered the open-weight era
   Introduced architectural defaults like RMSNorm, SwiGLU
   and RoPE as standard practice

8. RoFormer: Rotary Position Embedding (Su et al., 2021)

   Positional encoding that became the modern default for long-context LLMs

9. FlashAttention (Dao et al., 2022)

   Memory-efficient attention that enabled long context windows
   and high-throughput inference by optimizing GPU memory access.

10. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (Lewis et al., 2020)

    Combines parametric models with external knowledge sources
    Foundational for grounded and enterprise systems

11. Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback (InstructGPT) (Ouyang et al., 2022)

    The modern post-training and alignment blueprint
    that instruction-tuned models follow

12. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) (Rafailov et al., 2023)

    A simpler and more stable alternative to PPO-based RLHF
    Preference alignment via the loss function

13. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models (Wei et al., 2022)

    Demonstrated that reasoning can be elicited through prompting
    alone and laid the groundwork for later reasoning-focused training

14. ReAct: Reasoning and Acting (Yao et al., 2022 / ICLR 2023)

    The foundation of agentic systems
    Combines reasoning traces with tool use and environment interaction

15. DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (Guo et al., 2025)

    The R1 paper. Proved that large-scale reinforcement learning without
    supervised data can induce self-verification and structured reasoning behavior

16. Qwen3 Technical Report (Yang et al., 2025)

    A modern architecture lightweight overview
    Introduced unified MoE with Thinking Mode and Non-Thinking
    Mode to dynamically trade off cost and reasoning depth

17. Outrageously Large Neural Networks: Sparsely-Gated Mixture of Experts (Shazeer et al., 2017)

    The modern MoE ignition point
    Conditional computation at scale

18. Switch Transformers (Fedus et al., 2021)

    Simplified MoE routing using single-expert activation
    Key to stabilizing trillion-parameter training

19. Mixtral of Experts (Mistral AI, 2024)

    Open-weight MoE that proved sparse models can match dense quality
    while running at small-model inference cost

20. Sparse Upcycling: Training Mixture-of-Experts from Dense Checkpoints (Komatsuzaki et al., 2022 / ICLR 2023)

    Practical technique for converting dense checkpoints into MoE models
    Critical for compute reuse and iterative scaling

21. The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (Huh et al., 2024)

    Evidence that scaled models converge toward shared
    internal representations across modalities

22. Textbooks Are All You Need (Gunasekar et al., 2023)

    Demonstrated that high-quality synthetic data allows
    small models to outperform much larger ones

23. Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet (Templeton et al., 2024)

    The biggest leap in mechanistic interpretability
    Decomposes neural networks into millions of interpretable features

24. PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways (Chowdhery et al., 2022)

    A masterclass in large-scale training
    orchestration across thousands of accelerators

25. GLaM: Generalist Language Model (Du et al., 2022)

    Validated MoE scaling economics with massive
    total parameters but small active parameter counts

26. The Smol Training Playbook (Hugging Face, 2025)

    Practical end-to-end handbook for efficiently training language models

Bonus Material

T5: Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer (Raffel et al., 2019)
Toolformer (Schick et al., 2023)
GShard (Lepikhin et al., 2020)
Adaptive Mixtures of Local Experts (Jacobs et al., 1991)
Hierarchical Mixtures of Experts (Jordan and Jacobs, 1994)

If you deeply understand these fundamentals; Transformer core, scaling laws, FlashAttention, instruction tuning, R1-style reasoning, and MoE upcycling, you already understand LLMs better than most

Time to lock-in, good luck ;)

If one person with one agent can produce equal or better results than "hundreds of agents for weeks", then the answer to the question: "Can we scale autonomous coding by throwing more agents at a problem?", probably has a more pessimistic answer than some expected.

When materials become just one atom thick, melting no longer follows the familiar rules. Instead of jumping straight from solid to liquid, an unusual in-between state emerges, where atomic positions loosen like a liquid but still keep some solid-like order. Scientists at the University of Vienna have now captured this elusive “hexatic” phase in real time by filming an ultra-thin silver iodide crystal as it melted inside a protective graphene sandwich.

Mai Trinh is highlighting how difficult it is for Gen Z entrepreneurs to build and scale tech startups in Canada, and why many ultimately move south of the border.

As an international student from Vietnam and her co-founder Gabriel Ravacci, from Brazil, Trinh explained the two would need to work for other employers to collect enough points under Canada’s Comprehensive Ranking System to qualify for permanent residency.

Teens can’t switch off from Instagram even if they want to. Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in a compulsive behaviour that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.

“negative wellbeing effects can result from user behaviors” and documenting four video-watching behaviors that bring about the majority of negative wellbeing effects: (1) late night use, (2) heavy habitual use, (3) unintentional use, and (4) problematic content.

despite the rules that don’t allow those under the age of 13 to be on Snapchat, our focus group clearly showed that the middle school set was a rabid – almost exclusive – user of Snapchat.

a parent asked ‘ how old were you when you started using social media.’ All of them said btwn ages 8-12 and admitted to lieing about their birthdate to get around it

compulsive usage on TikTok is rampant and our users need better tools to understand their usage, manage it effectively, and ensure being on TikTok is time well spent

A hacked trove of emails reveals the revolving door of political leaders, tech billionaires, and intelligence officers.

Kilmeade’s plea to the president was just one part of what appeared to be a multi-pronged effort by Rupert Murdoch to use his right-wing media empire to push the Trump administration to shift its tactics as backlash over the Pretti shooting only intensified. It also saw Fox News and Murdoch’s conservative publications suddenly reverse course and change their own narrative about the killing.

In fact, by the end of the night Monday, it got to the point that even Sean Hannity – Trump’s close confidant who has been a vocal proponent of the administration’s heavy-handed mass deportation operation – took to the air to say that ICE should stop “going into Home Depots and arresting people,” adding that it wasn’t a “good idea.”

Verrucchi now suspects this is key to how time works. The arrow of time, she says, might simply be a record of what has been measured. Like flicking through a cosmic flipbook, we reveal new pages by interacting with the elements of reality – or “making measurements” as a physicist might put it. The act of simply being in the world collapses our quantum reality into a definite state, leaving an irreversible record behind.

And if clocks are physical systems that record measurements – and we are, too – then perhaps we aren’t just observers of time, says Verrucchi, but participants in its making: “You create time when you ask what time it is.”

The Trump administration on Monday bowed to increasing pressure to change up its immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, after a second person was killed by federal agents. The White House replaced Greg Bovino with Tom Homan on the ground and signaled a more cooperative tone with local Democrats.

The abrupt firing and replacement of 12 of President Biden’s appointed council members, which no president has done before, has been perceived by many as a partisan attack on the museum. Especially after White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement saying, “President Trump looks forward to appointing new individuals who will not only continue to honor the memory of those who perished in the Holocaust, but who are also steadfast supporters of the State of Israel.”

Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodríguez said Sunday she has had “enough” of Washington’s orders, as she works to unite the country after the US capture of its former leader Nicolás Maduro.

Days after the US strikes on Caracas in early January, the Trump administration outlined a number of demands that Venezuela must agree to, including cutting ties with China, Iran, Russia and Cuba, and agreeing to partner exclusively with the US on oil production, two senior White House officials told CNN at the time.

I reverse-engineered Claude's hidden subscription usage caps from two unrounded utilization floats, recovered exact denominators via Stern-Brocot, and compared what Pro/Max actually buy you versus API pricing (including caching).

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith testified publicly for the first time on Capitol Hill about his investigation of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

He said the case had “proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” and remained confident had it gone to trial.

Smith told the committee that he believed he could have obtained a conviction in what was seen by many as the most serious of the charges: Conspiring to deny Americans a free and fair election by pushing to overturn the 2020 election.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power,” said Smith.

Multiple sources have told Liberation Times that, during the Obama administration, senior intelligence figures James Clapper and Stephanie O’Sullivan oversaw a program relating to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Liberation Times sources allege that Northrop Grumman’s Tejon Ranch Radar Cross Section Facility in southern California is a site where UAPs are routinely retrieved.

Hell froze over. Anthropic fixed Claude Code's signature flicker in their latest update (2.0.72)

“The Guidelines err in promoting meat and dairy products, which are principal drivers of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity,” read a statement from Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

“I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid that features red meat and saturated fat sources at the very top, as if that’s something to prioritize,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford University, told NPR. “It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”

“Flipping the food pyramid upside down to encourage more meat and dairy consumption is complete ignorance. It’s a giant step back from decades of evidence-based nutrition research and science,” registered dietitian nutritionist Ashley Kitchens, who promotes vegan-based diets, told Truthout.

A culture of corruption is pernicious because it is not just a deviation from government in the public interest; it is also the destruction of the state’s democratic legitimacy. It undermines the necessary faith that the representatives of the people are acting in the interest of the people.

4 percent think it’s a good idea for America to take Greenland by military force. To put that in context: According to a 2022 survey, about 13 percent of Americans believe in Bigfoot.

To watch the push for Greenland is to experience one of the wildest things that any country or head of state has done in the entire history of the modern world, dating back to the very creation of the nation-state era in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.

At one level, Trump’s January rampage highlights the collective failure of every institution, safeguard, check, and balance that the United States thought it had in place to limit executive power gone berserk.

This time, any pretense that the values of Davos and Mr. Trump’s worldview are in opposition has been carefully erased. The official program still includes sessions on the subjects of traditional interest, like one entitled “Can EVs Really Dominate?” But artificial intelligence and crypto have been elevated as the central areas of concern.

the longstanding U.S.-led, rules-based international order is over

“There may be a temptation to duck and hope that all of this passes. But Trump’s fixation on territorial expansion looks real,” he said, suggesting Canada should join European countries to show strong solidarity with Denmark.

Part of what made the liberal world order liberal was the principle of self-­determination enshrined in the Atlantic Charter and United Nations Charter. This principle was sometimes violated, including by the United States. But in past multi­polar orders, great powers never even had to consider the rights of small nations, and they didn’t. By contrast, the liberalism of the American order pressured powerful countries to cede sovereignty and independence to smaller ones in their orbits.

Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern and Central Europe would not have been so bent on escape had there been nothing to escape to. The American order promised a higher standard of living, national sovereignty, and legal and institutional equali­ty. This gave nations living under the shadow of the Soviet Union an option other than accommodation, and when given the chance to leave Moscow’s control, they took it.

That era is over. Trump has managed in just one year to destroy the American order that was, and he has weakened America’s ability to protect its interests in the world that will be. If Americans thought defending the liberal world order was too expensive, wait until they start paying for what comes next.

By analyzing $4 trillion of shipments between January 2024 and November 2025, the Kiel Institute researchers found that foreign exporters absorbed only about 4% of the burden of last year’s U.S. tariff increases by lowering their prices, while American consumers and importers absorbed 96%.

In our benchmark scenario, we find that under-reported income rises from about 10% of true income in the bottom 90% of the income distribution to 16% at the 99th percentile of income, where it remains constant or falls

Total billionaire wealth in the EU reached €2.4 trillion by late November, exceeding Italy's entire GDP of €2.2 trillion and approaching France's €2.9 trillion economy, a new Oxfam report found.

Only 8% of Americans support the U.S. using military force to take control of Greenland.

Only 13% of Americans support paying Greenland residents to encourage secession from Denmark.

Venezuela owes international bondholders, oil companies and others as much as $170 billion — one reason why US firms have been reluctant to help rebuild the country’s infrastructure.

Trump told ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance last week that the US is “not going to look at what people lost in the past, because that was their fault.”

The primary reason that Title 42 is not a good deterrent for this population is that they are not likely to be seeking to apply for asylum but rather to enter the country without being arrested, so that they can find jobs. Previously, single adults were likely to be incarcerated for an extended period after their arrest and possibly prosecuted criminally and sent to a U.S. prison. “They are sending back people very quickly, in hours,” said one Mexican seeking to cross. “The rumor is that chances of crossing undetected are higher, as you can try and try again without much consequences.”

"the agreement made the US the de facto protector of Greenland"

US president’s friend Ronald Lauder – who first proposed Arctic expansion – is now making deals in the island

Jonathan Ross, who was identified as the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good, was still on the scene, according to a report from the Minneapolis Police Department. About 15 minutes later, he was taken to a federal building.

There are many excuses for failing to tax the ultra-wealthy. The truth is that governments don’t tackle the problem because they don’t want to, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

“It feels like an invasion,” said a woman who asked not to be named out of fear of retaliation. She was protesting at the Whipple federal detention facility at 7 a.m. on a frigid, 12-degree morning. The woman, a restaurant owner, said she closed her business temporarily because she was trying to protect her employees who were immigrants. “It feels very much like a Nazi Germany situation to me. It needs to stop, and people need to know what’s going on.”

Win for Memphis activists who say ‘Colossus’ facilities add extra pollution to already overburdened communities

“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he said, referring to a proposed missile defence system.

Greenland and Denmark have repeatedly pointed out that a 1951 bilateral agreement already allowed the US to vastly expand its military presence on the island.

Only 4%, including just one in 10 Republicans and almost no Democrats, said military force would be a “good idea”.

In October 2023, the Sinaloa Cartel looked to publicly signal that it was moving away from fentanyl trafficking amid an intensifying crackdown on its operations by U.S. and Mexican authorities. As one of two major suppliers, this would be a significant shift, but it remains unclear how genuine this announcement was. In October 2025, the Treasury Department sanctioned a slew of companies and their affiliates for allegedly supplying fentanyl precursors to a faction of Sinaloa.

Researchers cannot yet say with confidence why deaths have gone down. Experts have offered multiple possible explanations: increased availability of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, shifts in how people use drugs, and the growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.

Some also point to research that suggests the number of people likely to overdose has been shrinking, as fewer teens take up drugs and many illicit drug users have died.

Two other theories recently joined the list.

In a paper published last week in the journal Science, University of Maryland researchers point to the drug supply. They say regulatory changes in China a few years ago appear to have diminished the availability of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl.

Their argument is based partly on information from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which last year reported that the purity — and dangerous potency — of fentanyl rose early in the COVID-19 pandemic but fell after 2022. It suggests it became harder to make fentanyl and its potency was diluted.

MANN: Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. When I first started reporting on fentanyl, A, most experts said stopping this drug or even slow [inaudible] significantly would be nearly impossible. That's because fentanyl is just easy to make from industrial chemicals. So drug policy experts I've been speaking to think Biden expanded health care and drug addiction treatment programs in ways that saved lives. And this new paper suggests Biden's team also convinced China to help curb the sale of so-called precursor chemicals that are needed to make fentanyl in ways that really hit the drug gangs hard. Again, here's Keith Humphreys.

The Biden administration was disrupting fentanyl traffickers — arresting and prosecuting key drug cartel leaders. Federal officials were also expanding public health and medical insurance programs, funneling more dollars to harm-reduction efforts and making it easier for people to access medications like naloxone and buprenorphine that help prevent overdoses.

An estimated 109,783 additional people would have died from opioid overdose if the population exposed to opioid overdose risk had remained constant rather than declining; an estimated 260,024 fewer people would have died from overdose if probability of fentanyl involvement in opioid overdose deaths had remained constant rather than increasing. Fentanyl's representation in the U.S. drug supply appears to be a key driver of overdose trends. A declining population exposed to overdose risk over the last decade may be related to prior deaths and to evidence-based efforts to prevent substance use and opioid use disorder.

“when you think of it, we shouldn't even have an election.”

The effects of climate change and global warming are already evident and shaking up our risk landscape: warmer average temperatures, rising sea levels, melting ice caps, longer and more frequent heatwaves, erratic rainfall patterns and more weather extremes.

A most urgent question we need to ask is not only how to tackle climate change, but also how we can best adapt to a changing climate and avert the most damaging consequences – in short, how to mitigate climate risk.